CPU/GPU Mystery

i've been on SL for a couple of years, everything runs fine other than a few momentary glitches (frames freeze for a few seconds and rezzing takes time). I run an Athlon 2.4 Gig CPU and have 2 gigs of RAM, and windows task manager shows the CPU running at 99% load, anytime I run SL. Not a big deal, everything smooths out after a few seconds, but that meter bounces up and down from maybe 80 back up to 99%. I bought an Nvidia G-8800 graphics card with 750 Megs of onboard video memory, thinking this would take some of the load off the CPU. Everything runs great, rezzing is faster than ever, no more freeze frames, but the CPU never dropped in load percentage. I've played with all my inworld client setting, even messed with the "my internet connection" speeds to see if it was playing catch-up with packet loss or something... not really an "issue", but can anyone tell me why a CPU rated at twice the speed of the SL/Linden recommended speed is still shouldering so much of the load? Thanks in advance for any and all info.

I think SL tends to use all the CPU time it can.

If you running other applications does it appear to be sharing the processor properly between SL and the other applications?

Perfectly normal behavior. SL will always use all resources available to it.

As Suzanne seemed to be getting at, as long as you've got no problem running other applications at the same time (within reason, of course), everything is fine.

The system requirements are too low.

It's funny that everyone seems to always say "it's normal". The last time I saw that on a computer I was running was about 3 years ago when I had an old P4 single core processor. Since then I've upgraded my system three times. Each time getting a newer, faster CPU until I have what I presently have (Core 2 Duo Quad E6600). And each upgrade lessened the usage considerably. My CPU usage runs in the neighborhood of 25%...........quite consistantly.

It's "normal" if you are running an older CPU.......abnormal if running a modern, faster CPU. I tend to preferr Intel over AMD........maybe it's is a "normal" thing for AMD's. There is another person in this house that runs SL.........that computer mimicks mine.

nope, even my single core x64 stays pretty low

99% of the time its ALLLLL the other crap in the background running, windows stuff, quicktime, that nvidia thingie ect ect ect which stays pretty dormant until something like SL sets everything off at once

... come to think of it my old 1.9 ghz 32 bit athalon xp stayed pretty low too

hey everybody, thanks for the replies! Just an update to clarify: doesn't seem to matter if i'm running apps or not, zero or 20 seperate browsers, firefox with 20 open tabs, even M$ office (which tends to peak at 30% CPU usage, all by itself). No matter how much I load the system, (with SL NOT running) it never goes above 60%. The CPU is a 64-bit, single-core, a little over 3 years old. Apps and progs share resources fine, I've even tried to crash the box by OVERloading it (with and w/o SL running (with video and mic and sound)), even with yahoo and msn IM's ; and Youtube video running..... lol no crash occured----even with SL running full-bore, cpu peaks at 99% and the only slowdown i noticed was about a ten second delay in frame-rate changes WHILE i was accessing an extremely large Office d/base. lol Let the noodle-scratching begin! lol sidenote: with SL running, the moment i click onto any other running app, or w/o any apps running, just click my taskbar to look at the clock, the load drops 20-30%. So it seems to mirror the consensus, SL just uses all the resources it can to give me the best experience, everything runs beautifully, I'm not complaining at all, just wanted to toss out the info and see what other user experiences are like. Thank You again, One and All. My Humble self hath learned from you wizened Ones.

For those quoting CPU percentages, make sure SL is the active window. When it's not, it offers up more time to other processes. When it's the active window it uses all it can for itself.

If you have a quad-core processor running 25%, SL is probably fully loading one core. On my newer 2-core processor with decent graphics card, SL uses 50% CPU, which is one core fully loaded. If the task manager is the active window, the CPU usage goes to 11% or so.

If you're concerned about it, you can tell SL to offer up more CPU time to other programs using the "cooperative" command line argument.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Client_parameters

MY older single cores run 100% my dual runs 50% and my Quad 25%

SL will and does use 100% if it can.