Lately I’ve been monitoring realtime, my GPU, CPU and Ram memory usage, in order to monitor, trouble shoot and optimize.
Reasons I started doing this, is my latest experimentations with UE4 and some crashes. Monitoring did me good, since I discovered the laptop’s cooling airvents were completely clogged and followed up on my RAM by adding as needed. In short it helped me run UE4 and all other of my programs smoothly.
I have MSI Afterburner in the background and the most useful of the stats are displayed on my taskbar. See screen capture image below (BottomRight, reading left to right: in red, CPU usage and temperature / in orange, GPUcore1 usage, GPUcore2 usage, GPU temperature / in cyan RAM usage) :
The image above was taken in Blender, during rendering and the GPU figures are circled. The mouse hovering reveals that GPUcore2 usage is 0% ! while GPUcore1 is 100% (temperature 62deg Celcius).
I have no reason to believe this is an erroneous show by Afterburner, because the figures work in all other applications, including Blender when not rendering.
So can it be right? and why would only one core of two be in use?
My benchfigures and comparative figures with other computers in my office, place this machine where it is expected (not half the performance) … so I’m puzzled…
Here is the hardware setup:
MSI GT70 0NE laptop, gpu is Nvidia GEforce 680M (dedicated using Optimus), 20GB RAM, Windows 7x64bit
GPU cards, or GPU cores? Do you actually have multiple video cards in your laptop? Or is this reporting on one discrete card and the hardware built in to the CPU? And are you running any kind of power management, as most laptops will turn things off/on depending on battery level, external power, and program in use?
There is one discreet GPU MXM card on the laptop. This is the only one working during Blender (the other card, on board is Intel, and has no CUDA). The card has a Nvidia GTX 680 GPU. The card is reported by MSI is only the Nvidia and I believe it is correctly reported as having two cores (?).
Those work fine in UE4 and other programs, as well as other programs and is also reported working during Blender not when rendering.
The GTX 680M has 1344 CUDA cores - so that can’t be what Afterburner is showing.
I second dgorsman’s assumption that one of those ominous “cores” (read: cards) is the nVidia device and the other one is the inbuilt Intel. Since the latter has nothing to do while rendering on the nVidia GPU, it is more or less idling at 0-1% load.
The fact that Blender doesn’t use that card does not mean it isn’t there for Afterburner to see.
BTW, where does that “GPUcore” talk come from, anyway? Your screenshot shows “GPU2 usage” being displayed while hovering with the mouse over the temperature, not “GPUcore2 usage”…?
