Heavy GPU load on AMD R9 290

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Templer42
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Heavy GPU load on AMD R9 290

Postby Templer42 » Sat Oct 01, 2016 10:37 pm

Hey.

It has been quite a while since I played Prison Architect (PA) the last time (meanwhile I also upgraded my system), but now I am encountering a heavy load of my graphics card. Playing the game leads to an (unexpected) load of approx. 50% up to 80% (spikes) of my GPU. The clock speed of the memory of my graphics card (and the GPU itself) reaches maximum. The temperature increases to 65°C and beyond (closed the game before reaching higher temperatures).

I reinstalled the game, disabled all mods and started a new game. I paused the game, but my graphics card heated up again. Zooming in to maximum increased the load to ~60%, even if the game was paused/idle! Besides that I encountered a CPU load of about 20-25% (but I consider this as normal for PA).
Updating the AMD driver didn't resolve that issue.

Starting PA in safe mode brings up the message: "Sprite Sheet Downscaled". Then PA starts in a small window - with ~30% GPU load. Maximizing this windows leads to ~50% GPU load; same as before.

My system specs:
Intel i7-6700K @ 4.00GHz
16 GB RAM
AMD R9 290
64-bit Windows 10 Pro

Playing PA with 1920x1080 on 1 monitor (2 are connected - but I also tried to disable one and only play on the other - same issue), windowed and full, with no filtering.


TL;DR: ~50% GPU load with AMD R9 290 at a freshly installed new game, no mods, game paused and zoomed in.

It would be great to give me some ideas/advises how to resolve that issue - I have not looked for a ticket/bug addressing this issue yet

Cheers
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xander
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Re: Heavy GPU load on AMD R9 290

Postby xander » Wed Oct 05, 2016 12:18 am

While Prison Architect isn't generally super-duper GPU intensive (instead, it usually hits the CPU pretty hard), I don't see high processor utilization as a problem. Your operating system is supposed to protect the hardware from working so hard that it causes damage to itself, but, beyond that, it should give any program all the resources that it requires. It isn't the program's fault if the OS grants it the resources that it wants. Basically, I'm not sure that I understand the problem.

If high CPU/GPU utilization bother you, there are system settings that should allow you to throttle things down, but this is likely to lead to the game performing less well.

xander

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