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SvennoJ on 09 April 2016
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sc94597 said:
SvennoJ said:

Elite Dangerous runs between 30fps and 7fps on my laptop and can go down to 0.5fps while leaving 80% of my CPU unused, as well as 80% of my ram causing it to take upto 20 seconds again to load a system map again it just loaded 10 seconds ago. You need a big overhead compared to consoles to keep the performance stable, developers simply don't have the time to optimize for PC hardware configurations.

What are your laptops specifications? For most games I get a consistent 50% across all of my four cores and my GPU (r9 280x) tends to use 60-95% of its performance depending on the game and how demanding the scene is.  

This has much less to do with optimization on an open-platform, and much more to do with developers still not getting a hang of multithreading when programming their games (in other words it is a programming limitation.) If the PS4/XBO didn't have low-end CPU's and we were able to measure how much the CPU is being used at any one point, I think we would see a similar phenomenon. 

Anyway, the last video I posted shows that you really don't need a big overhead. An i3 and GTX 750 Ti matches consoles quite fine in visuals and performance, and the GTX 750 TI has similar theoretical performance to the PS4's GPU. 

I7 4700MQ, 4 cores, 8 threads, 2.4ghz, 3.4ghz turbo (don't think that's enabled on my laptop)
16 GB RAM
Intel HD Graphics 4600
NVidea GForce GT 740M (384 CUDA cores at 980Mhz 2GB dedicated DDR3 at 1800 Mhz 14.4 GB/s)

Elite Dangerous is made to offload the CPU by using the GPU which works to my Laptop's disdavantage, leaving the CPU usage below 20% and for example loading of the system map or galaxy map depends on current fps which makes no sense at all. Enabling v-sync makes loading take longer, while that should leave more time available! And ofcourse it won't enlist help of the 2nd GPU either.

Most games atm are made with the assumption that there is a powerful GPU and 2 fast CPU cores, ignoring the rest.
However my laptop would probably overheat if something would use it close to 100% of its actual capabilities, efficient cooling is an afterthought in these things. I notice the frame rate getting worse as the GPU heats up and sound starts stuttering after a while.

Consoles really aren't that bad value! Less than half of the price, 3 times the GPU power, bought around the same time.