I notice that my framerates are very low suddenly and CPU limited so I mess around with some options in the hope that they might magically make the the game playable. Doing this I notice that lowering rendering quality raises my framerates so I keep lowering it until I hit 50% and get decent frames. Then the framerate switches from CPU limited to GPU limited. I don't know if this is the same for anyone else or if this was happening before. It does not seem right.
I think its very bad personally. I used DxTory's FPS indicator to keep a tab on the FPS rather than the ingames version. Its too inconsistent for my liking.
At first I was only going to say that "this may indicate you have a GPU problem;" but, after re-reading and thinking it over a bit, I'm not so certain anymore. HIGHer settings puts less graphical work on the CPU and more on your GPU; LOWer graphical settings make your CPU do work that normally would be given to the GPU, as the same time reducing the strain of graphical tasks required. Actual game code that doesn't deal with graphical elements should stay roughly the same. This is our previous understanding of the way that indicator worked. For example, CPU-bound means that too much load is on the CPU; and: if you were running LOW by choice, you should move your graphics settings higher to make the GPU do its fair share of the work; if you were running HIGH settings, the problem would have to do with your CPU and/or related equipment. If switching to LOW caused you to become GPU-bound as reported by ALT+F, I am not certain what is going on. The distinction for being bound may have changed.
I normally use medium. But what started me thinking was using high graphics quality and seeing this cpu bound framerate being reported.
The ingame one is an average over a small period of time that has a pretty low update rate for an FPS counter, but it will tell you what your general FPS loss is from.
Well, everything above LOW uses (used) the GPU to some realistic degree, but you get what I mean. Rendering quality (the slider) is a kind of resolution adjustment that doesn't actual adjust the resolution of the game. It deals with anti-aliasing (jaggy smoothing). For example, for numbers above 1.0, you are effectively supersampling the game and taxing the extra amount to the GPU. Which is why switching from CPU-bound to GPU-bound by lower rendering quality slider is still strange. At least adjusting the slider gave you some respite from low framerates. That's a refreshingly normal response.
I've noticed that higher rendering quality does indeed require more CPU power (in addition to LOTS more GPU power). Not sure why, just the way it is.
Is this something new recently? Like do we think they have optimised for the PS4 by moving stuff from the GPU to CPU even if that is really bad for PC?
It's fairly close, when compared to the one that comes with nvidia shadowplay, which uses a longer average based on update rate.
I reinstalled nvidia drivers then rebooted and that seemed to fix the worst of my framerate problems in terms of having to lower render quality. I think that the false CPU bound indicator might come from changing the maximum pre-rendered frames setting which I had forgotten that I had changed.
