How to tell what your GPU load is (and thus see where your bottlenecks is)

[moog]

I think "GPU load" is only available for recent ATI hardware not nVidia

[mickske]

This thread seems to be perfect to ask a question.

PC info (skip this if you don't want to read everything)
GPU: Ati Radeon HD 4800 - GPU load when 5-boxing is about 35-40%. Temperature rises to 80 degrees celcius but it seems like this card is pretty "hot" in general (75 degrees while idling...)

CPU: Intel Dual Core E8200 - CPU load is about 55-60% when 5-boxing. It goes up and down all the time but on average I think it's between that range.

RAM - 4x1GB Corsair - Ram load is about 2.2GB when I'm only running the 5 WoWs + irssi (irc) + pidgin (msn). Add another 100-150MB for every firefox window that I have open (usually 1).

Problem : I have lag in Shattrah and I want to know where it's coming from... since none of these components are working at full capactity it must be the harddrives? I'm using 2 harddrives. 1 recent HD runs my main WoW with full graphics at 1600x1200. The other HD (old one, maybe 4 years, though i didnt use it for 1.5 year..) runs the 4 slaves in low settings at <800x600.

Could it be the HDs causing lag/freezes in Shattrah? The HDs make ALOT of noise when I run into cities... maybe the old HD is still a 5x00RPM, that would be pretty gay i guess... Is buying a small 10000RPM hd worth it?

[Xzin]

Hard drives GENERALLY only impact load times not FPS.

[-silencer-]

Hard drives GENERALLY only impact load times not FPS.

In Shatt/cities, there are always players entering/leaving your area, causing many accesses to the hard drive to load up objects/textures. Although large outdoor areas with lots of polys are heavily influenced by videocard power, I suspect much of the city lag is due to hard drive access. I'm pulling the string on an SSD for testing soon.. all reviews I can read seem to indicate that they'd be fantastic for our needs - extremely fast access time and reads, while lagging behind on writes (which we don't care about for data access anyway).

[Icetech]

ning, with 5 wows runnuing, i have 11% GPU load and 81c.. might turn the fan speed up some more

BTW thats ona hd4850...

I always noticed a HUGE visual difference goign to this card from a 8800GTS.. and it does horizontal span better...

[Arryth]

Get carbonite quest. Has more info available than QH does and doesn't have the resource hog issues.

Thanks mate, for sure will check it out. I was looking for an alternative after spending an entire day watching the Quest Helper memory leak in horror for about eight hours the other day, as its usage on each instance climbed higher and higher.... To bad that has not been fixed yet, it is otherwise a nice add on.

[Xzin]

Hard drives GENERALLY only impact load times not FPS.

In Shatt/cities, there are always players entering/leaving your area, causing many accesses to the hard drive to load up objects/textures. Although large outdoor areas with lots of polys are heavily influenced by videocard power, I suspect much of the city lag is due to hard drive access. I'm pulling the string on an SSD for testing soon.. all reviews I can read seem to indicate that they'd be fantastic for our needs - extremely fast access time and reads, while lagging behind on writes (which we don't care about for data access anyway).

I agree completely that SSDs will be faster and preferred. But I question the amount of data that is actually being loaded uncached and highly doubt the hard drive is the major issue when it comes to staying in one area. Only one way to know for sure, which is to try a SSD and a hard drive side by side in the same system. My money is on a very minor (less than 3 or 4) fps bump for single systems. 5 on one hard drive might be different but keep in mind that most drives can do 30 - 40 megs a second and WoW data just isn't THAT big.

[mickske]

ning, with 5 wows runnuing, i have 11% GPU load and 81c.. might turn the fan speed up some more

BTW thats ona hd4850...

I always noticed a HUGE visual difference goign to this card from a 8800GTS.. and it does horizontal span better...

How can you adjust the fan speed of the H4xxx series? I did read somewhere that the fan of the HD4800 wasn't running at full speed which means that the temperatures are pretty high...

And about the shattrah problems I have: it's not really fps lag, it's just freezes of 1second or more on either some of my slaves or my main character (which causes them to stop walking) and the HD is making alot of noise (the kind of noise it makes when you're unrarring 10 items at the time...) so I guess it's very busy reading loads of stuff. I'll go ahead and test my HDs on speed and see what that gives.

[Frosty]

Get carbonite quest. Has more info available than QH does and doesn't have the resource hog issues.

Does Carbonite quest talk with other copies of itself? I like being able too see how many more things my alts need to do. Although I could use backtracker to solve this if it doesn't.

It looks like it is on their "to-do" list. http://www.carboniteaddon.com/cs/forums/t/282.aspx

Still, since I'm doing the same quests for the most part, I may give this a shot. My computers need all the help they can get! :P

[Icetech]

Mick, for the fan speed you edit a ini file that has to do with the ATI catalyst... and i didnt think bout it.. but i formatted recently and didnt edit that file i will do that tonight.. it makes a GIANT difference.. ATI wanted the card silent from the factory so they set the fan very low... just turning it upto like 45% keeps it quiet, but the temp drops from like 65c idle to 35c just crazy difference..

And your shat problem is the harddrives.. Even on my system with 3 drives in raid 0 i can get stutter in shatt...the place is a black hole of slow

ning, with 5 wows runnuing, i have 11% GPU load and 81c.. might turn the fan speed up some more

BTW thats ona hd4850...

I always noticed a HUGE visual difference goign to this card from a 8800GTS.. and it does horizontal span better...

How can you adjust the fan speed of the H4xxx series? I did read somewhere that the fan of the HD4800 wasn't running at full speed which means that the temperatures are pretty high...

And about the shattrah problems I have: it's not really fps lag, it's just freezes of 1second or more on either some of my slaves or my main character (which causes them to stop walking) and the HD is making alot of noise (the kind of noise it makes when you're unrarring 10 items at the time...) so I guess it's very busy reading loads of stuff. I'll go ahead and test my HDs on speed and see what that gives.