I've been playing a few games lately, and I've noticed that my Radeon RX 9060 XT GPU is consistently reaching nearly 100% usage, while my Intel Core i5-7500F CPU is only sitting around 20 to 30% usage. Is this typical behavior? I wouldn't have thought these games would be that GPU-intensive given their graphics requirements. My FPS seems good, but I wonder if this indicates a bottleneck somewhere in my setup. Could having Chrome open in the background be affecting this? Any insight would be appreciated!
2 Answers
It really depends on what games you're playing and your graphics settings. If you're gaming at a high resolution like 1440p, this level of GPU usage is very common. Very few games will push a modern 6-core CPU to its limits unless it's doing something very demanding like compiling shaders.
It's actually pretty normal for your GPU to be maxed out while the CPU is at lower usage levels. Most modern games are designed to leverage the GPU's power, and they often don't use all CPU cores fully. Typically, one or two threads will be heavily utilized, while others do minimal work. This split in usage means your graphics card is performing optimally!
Yeah, but you might want to check your per-core CPU usage. Sometimes a couple of cores are maxed while the rest are idle.