FPS drops is it my hardware or something else?

I'm currently running 4x crusaders lvling them was as good as it could be not a single problem. However now that i've start rifting almost every fight that has either 6+ mobs or elite packs make my fps go from steady 50-60 down to <10. i've put all settings to low enabled low fx, disabled anti-aliasing. basiaclly all the fps quick fixes i've done without any success. so i started looking at my hardware to see if there was something wrong. what follows are the stats from hardware monitor during 1 rift session. These are the max values during that rift.

CPU: Intel Core i7-2600k
CPU Core #1 91,5 %
CPU Core #2 80,0 %
CPU Core #3 86,9 %
CPU Core #4 80,8 %

RAM: 6,7-7,2 / 8 gb

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
GPU Core 95 %
GPU mem Controller 42 %
GPU Memory 40%

Now i assume the CPU can handle it what worries me is the GPU. is it the 95 % that is causing the fps drops? which imo is a little bit weird should it not be at 100% for my frames to drop?

should note i've gone through the CPU wizard and tried all the different options with no success

[bob]

You have said these are max values, so the 95% may mean it hit that for the processing of 1 frame during the session. You need to monitor over the complete session and then look at the trend (this may require other tools - I've noted some perf counters that are useful).

The CPU % is getting up there, but why. What processes are using CPU time, and have you broken it down so you know whether each game instance is at 20% and there is something else chewing up with rest, or is it purely game using the 328% of CPU time (each core is 100%, so you have 400%). If the CPU is in Kernel (privileged) time rather than User time a lot, then that is not great, as it is dealing with system processing rather than your game, so it is worthwhile checking for that.


If the GPU alone was the bottleneck then it would probably be topping out at somewhere between 98-100%, but if it is waiting on the CPU, because it is also fairly busy (not excessively, but getting there), then that percentage will be a little lower. Usually once the CPU starts getting over 80% constant then you will notice the impact on other services.

It is possible that the cause of the CPU being busy is the ram limitation of 8GB. With limited ram, there will be a lot of calls for the CPU to be loading/reloading new data to ram all the time, thus making it busy (and slow while it waits or context switches). I realise that there is some free space, but that doesn't mean you aren't getting thrashing going on while Windows is trying to make sure that the system stay's responsive. To check this out you need to also monitor what is going on with the memory and disk. Starting places would be the Page Faults/Sec and Pages Input/Sec. You could also monitor the Page Writes/Sec to see if the paging file is getting a workout. Of course it could be loading directly via DMA to the GPU too, but that is a little more difficult to track.

For the disk you are interested in the amount of bytes moving as well as the latency, and the queue depth. On an SSD, latency and queue depth should all be low, unless you have a lack of free space, and there is significant amounts of writing going on, which means the wear levelling algorithms will probably be impacting performance. For these you need to look at the Avg Disk Bytes/Write, Disk Writes/sec Disk Write Bytes/sec, Disk Reads/sec, Disk Read Bytes/sec, Avg.Disk Write Queue Length, Current Disk Queue Length.




TL;DR Your numbers are an indication of a potential limitation with the GPU followed by the CPU, but aren't conclusive. You need to monitor the values during the whole session, not just pick out the max values.

You have said these are max values, so the 95% may mean it hit that for the processing of 1 frame during the session.

Yes this was a misstake, i noticed that every time my frames dropped my CPU were usually around the 50-60 % never going above 75 %. The GPU was a bit crazy ranging from 30 % to 70 %. But it would seem the max value was taken from just that 1 frame as you guessed.

I tried to check if there was something else eating away on the CPU but the power seems to be distributed between the diablo exes. Here is how the resource monitor CPU tab looks like during an intense battle http://i.imgur.com/w1Ol3Mi.png
Here is how Disk looks like http://i.imgur.com/VrEQUv0.png
and here is Memory http://i.imgur.com/6dMPYes.png

all these are from times were my frames are <10

I tried looking for the things you suggested however since i'm far from computer savy i had an hard time understanding everything you wrote so i made alot of googling =) but to me everything looked to be in order expect for queue length which i could not figure out how to find :s

[bob]

Nothing look overly concerning in your screen shots, although you do have 1 game instance which is chewing through twice as much CPU as the others. It also appears to be stuck on CPU0/1, so, I would make sure that you have set in the CPU strategy to assign All instances to all cores (the bottom option in the CPU strategy Wizard). You can also do this manually by checking out the Performance tab on each Slot number of your Character set, and seeing if all CPU's are highlighted for each slot.

The latency reported on the disk is a little high for my liking especially as the disk should be active, and presumably is an SSD for both C: and D: (purely based on the size), but then that is where you need some profiling on it to see if that is common or was just a one off.

[MiRai]

Now i assume the CPU can handle it what worries me is the GPU. is it the 95 % that is causing the fps drops? which imo is a little bit weird should it not be at 100% for my frames to drop?

The load on your hardware could be changing hundreds of times per second and there is no way for the monitoring software to give you those exact numbers, so it gives you an estimate instead, but either way it's never a good thing to be that close to 100% because any sort of spike in load is going to push you right over the top.

Usually when something happens in game that causes a drop in performance it will show lower loads on monitoring software during the time of the problem rather than just display a full 100% load. If you can remove one (or maybe two) of the game clients from the mix and re-test I would imagine that you're going to see nothing but smooth gameplay no matter where you go, and if this is true, then it would be a clear indication that your hardware is being overloaded in its current configuration.

Sometimes you can just drop your foreground/background FPS to 30 and it will help clear up the issue, but that isn't going to drop your RAM usage.