# nVidia HOW TO: Force GPU Usage to 100%!



## PhyscoChain

Hello!

I decided today to begin to form this thread on how to force GPU usage to 100%. Over the years I've encountered problems with nVidia GPU's and their inaccurate use of the GPU in games. Most of us want as much frames per second in our games, even if it means lowering visual quality to increase the KD/R. And sometimes, your GPU just might want to sit at around 50-60%. So, without holding you up any-more, lets get started!

*BEFORE YOU BEGIN:*

- Make sure you have enough power for your entire system. Sometimes GPUs throttle when they do not receive enough power. Check your 12V rails and see how much amperage you have, and then check how much your GPU Requires to run safely. How to check how much watts you have on your 12V rails, is quite simple: ( 12* # amount of amps = How many watts) - So if I had a 40A 12V rail, it would go (12*40 = 480 Watts). After that, check how much watts your GPU uses.

- Make sure that your GPU is not damaged in any way. Having a damaged GPU does affect performance, especially if it has been hardware modified and the mod has gone wrong slightly.

- Make sure that the GPU drivers are up-to-date for your games. Having near latest or the most latest drivers will help you.

*PRE-FIXES:*

- If you run your computer 24/7, and the GPU has 2D and 3D Profiles assigned via Software, give it a good restart/shutdown. MSI Afterburner has the most problems for 2 & 3D profile detection. And, when you apply the profile, it doesn't give most of the time. So, first try a restart before doing any thing else.

- Make sure that your GPU isn't overheating. This is also another form of GPU throttling. If your temperatures begin to go over 80C under gaming load, there is an issue. install more fans and keep positive static pressure, get a new heatsink for your GPU, or force the GPU fan-speed to 80% or higher under load. I keep my GPU @ 100% the entire time.

*INSTRUCTIONS:*

- Right click on your desktop, and then select Nvidia Control Panel. Then in the tab menu's, go to Manage Settings. Then set the Power usage from Adaptive, to Prefer Maximum Performance, and switch the rest of the options accordingly to what renders more performance. Load up the game that you are having issues with, and play. If FPS is still an issue, increase the visual quality to *ONLY THINGS THAT AFFECT THE GPU. *Sometimes you have to give the GPU a little push for the performance. I recommend forcing 2-4X MSAA, or SSAO/HBAO. Have an on-screen display and enable the GPU Usage monitor, and Framerate. Get your settings set up right to where the game is cycling 90-100% all of the time.

- Make sure that you do not have any bottlenecking. Having the CPU bottleneck the GPU is bad, and having the GPU Bottlenecks the CPU. Fix that if this is an issue. Try and messing with settings in-game, and using the console command list in the game to optimize the game.

*ENDING:*

Well, there you guys have it - Hope I helped. This increased my framerate dramatically, and visual quality a lot for me in BF3 with my GTS 250. 60+ FPS @ 768P.


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## Mr-Elite1337

pretty sure everyone here already knows about the " prefer maximum performance" setting...


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## Fooxz

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Mr-Elite1337*
> 
> pretty sure everyone here already knows about the " prefer maximum performance" setting...


I didn't.


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## Blufner

I already knew about this setting, but it is good information for the few of us that don't. Thanks!


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## Mr Frosty

What is the point of this thread? If you want to force 99% GPU use then turn the bloody settings and anti-aliasing up


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## revamper

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Mr Frosty*
> 
> What is the point of this thread? If you want to force 99% GPU use then turn the bloody settings and anti-aliasing up


I've never seen my 570s go above 95% usage on BF3. It usually sits around 90-92%.

Thanks op!


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## dealio

tl;dr: set nvidia settings to moar usage = moar gpu usage


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## B!0HaZard

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *PhyscoChain*
> 
> *INSTRUCTIONS:*
> 
> - Right click on your desktop, and then select Nvidia Control Panel. Then in the tab menu's, go to Manage Settings. Then set the Power usage from Adaptive, to Prefer Maximum Performance, and *switch the rest of the options accordingly to what renders more performance*. Load up the game that you are having issues with, and play. If FPS is still an issue, increase the visual quality to ONLY THINGS THAT AFFECT THE GPU. Sometimes you have to give the GPU a little push for the performance. I recommend forcing 2-4X MSAA, or SSAO/HBAO. Have an on-screen display and enable the GPU Usage monitor, and Framerate. Get your settings set up right to where the game is cycling 90-100% all of the time.


If you set the driver options to performance, you get lower quality and lower GPU usage. This part doesn't make sense.


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## PhyscoChain

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *B!0HaZard*
> 
> If you set the driver options to performance, you get lower quality and lower GPU usage. This part doesn't make sense.


Hey,

What I meant was to set the options accordingly to gain performance by forging texture filtering and so forth.


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## PhyscoChain

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *revamper*
> 
> I've never seen my 570s go above 95% usage on BF3. It usually sits around 90-92%.
> Thanks op!


You are very welcome revamper! Glad I could help.


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## PhyscoChain

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Mr Frosty*
> 
> What is the point of this thread? If you want to force 99% GPU use then turn the bloody settings and anti-aliasing up


Hey,

If you would take the time to read this thread thoroughly, you would recognize that sometimes doing that wouldn't help some. So, I posted a 'How to fix this'. Make sense now?


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## PhyscoChain

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Mr-Elite1337*
> 
> pretty sure everyone here already knows about the " prefer maximum performance" setting...


 Actually, no, not EVERYONE does. No sense in trying to think the whole OCN Community knows everything.


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## Art Vanelay

This didn't fix ArmA 2.


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## ZealotKi11er

I have been having problem with GTX560M with GPU usage drop during BF3 and Dota 2. I am going to try if this fixes this.


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## hazarada

Forcing gpu usage to 100% makes no sense.. whats the point? people either want quality of performance, gpu usage is a product not a determining factor in either. Besides, not sure if you know this but the CPU has to call draw on every single polygon on every single frame, between draw calls the GPU just idles so if the CPU has some other stuff to do in between - you cant get the usage percentage higher no matter how much you fiddle with the driver options.

Also the usage % is wrong or rather its wrong to call it the usage percentage. What it is is the % of cycles where the shader ALU's have something to do, nobody says that something has to be smart though. Depending on gpu architecture and game programming the ALU could be working on a single calculation or up to 5 of them at the same time so in essence - if the shaders on a particular game are crap and only utilize the ALU for 1 calculation per cycle then for radeon 6xxxx series for example it is only using 20% of the gpu even though the usage might say 100%. Also there are other resources like texture samplers, tesselation units and blah blah that might not be used at all, this also is not included in that percentage.

The only real indicator of GPU usage that you can monitor is how much heat it puts out, some benchmarks (like furmark) are designed to push through the maximum amount of calculations each ALU can do within a cycle every cycle and as a result the gpu really does get utilized to nearly 100% and it puts out a lot of heat. In reality though this will never happen, at best games can utilize around 50% of the full potential of the shader units no matter what the usage % says.


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## B!0HaZard

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *PhyscoChain*
> 
> Hey,
> 
> What I meant was to set the options accordingly to gain performance by forging texture filtering and so forth.


If you set options to GAIN performance, you lower quality and GPU usage. I still don't understand what you mean.


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## PhyscoChain

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *B!0HaZard*
> 
> If you set options to GAIN performance, you lower quality and GPU usage. I still don't understand what you mean.


You may not understand IF you did not thoroughly read this thread and take time to consider. If your CPU is putting out all it can for the game and you're not forcing enough options, the GPU sits @ 50-60%, and that's framerate loss. Especially if you're running on all low quality, and you cant go lower. Just giving it a push can increase framerate with an option that only affects the GPU. It's practically decreasing bottleneck.


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## B!0HaZard

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *PhyscoChain*
> 
> You may not understand IF you did not thoroughly read this thread and take time to consider. If your CPU is putting out all it can for the game and you're not forcing enough options, the GPU sits @ 50-60%, and that's framerate loss. Especially if you're running on all low quality, and you cant go lower. Just giving it a push can increase framerate with an option that only affects the GPU. It's practically decreasing bottleneck.


But you're forcing them to performance. That means the GPU uses various optimizations to increase performance (obviously). The GPU that was sitting at 50-60% usage will now sit at 40% usage.
Let's say you're running all low quality and can't go lower. Your GPU is at 50-60% and the CPU is the bottleneck. No matter what you do, you cannot increase framerate by setting the GPU to "performance". You want to increase the load on your GPU, first by increasing any GPU relevant features ingame and then by forcing "quality" in the driver because that'll let the GPU work at 100%, thereby giving you an increase in quality without costing you any frames (as your CPU was bottlenecking anyway).

And let me just make this perfectly clear. If the CPU is bottlenecking, no amount of extra GPU load can increase framerate. You need to lower CPU load to do that. It isn't some kind of balance where you can take some CPU load and put it on the GPU instead. No, you're just adding additional load to the GPU.


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## Gallien

ITT. If you have a cpu bottleneck, crank the nvidia control panel GPU intensive settings for more GPU usage.


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## asleaker

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *hazarada*
> 
> Forcing gpu usage to 100% makes no sense.. whats the point? people either want quality of performance, gpu usage is a product not a determining factor in either. Besides, not sure if you know this but the CPU has to call draw on every single polygon on every single frame, between draw calls the GPU just idles so if the CPU has some other stuff to do in between - you cant get the usage percentage higher no matter how much you fiddle with the driver options.
> 
> Also the usage % is wrong or rather its wrong to call it the usage percentage. What it is is the % of cycles where the shader ALU's have something to do, nobody says that something has to be smart though. Depending on gpu architecture and game programming the ALU could be working on a single calculation or up to 5 of them at the same time so in essence - if the shaders on a particular game are crap and only utilize the ALU for 1 calculation per cycle then for radeon 6xxxx series for example it is only using 20% of the gpu even though the usage might say 100%. Also there are other resources like texture samplers, tesselation units and blah blah that might not be used at all, this also is not included in that percentage.
> 
> The only real indicator of GPU usage that you can monitor is how much heat it puts out, some benchmarks (like furmark) are designed to push through the maximum amount of calculations each ALU can do within a cycle every cycle and as a result the gpu really does get utilized to nearly 100% and it puts out a lot of heat. In reality though this will never happen, at best games can utilize around 50% of the full potential of the shader units no matter what the usage % says.


Thank you. . I have been reading all theads in every forum about what to do to maximize GPU when playing BF3. It seems that you have the right answer here!! I am so reliefed now..... And now I know why benchmarks ala Heaven 3.0 use 99% of both my gpu and BF3 use between 50-90%, usually 60-75%


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