CPU load 100% at all times?!

[netbjarne]

Hi folks

I'm playing Civ4 with reasonable performance. Not good, put playable. However, I'm wondering why CPU load are always 100%. At all times. Even if everything "disableable" is disabled, such as animations, sounds etc.

Once I opened a city screen that features no animations afaik, and leaved it open for halv an hour as I was distracted by family, and I was quite surprised to see that task manager had logged a constant 100% CPU load even if the game was left to itself without user interaction for a long time.

My quess, that this is caused by bad programming, and that the CPU load will be 100% no matter how powerful a CPU I may install. Most programs that just takes all the juice out of the computer at all times (video rendering for example), causes the computer to respond laggy - just like civ4. An other guess is, that this "ill-behaving" of civ4 is the reason than civ4 is being runned with the "BelowNormal" priority (check it in taskmanager).

Anyone has any comments on that? - Anyone experiencing less than 100% cpu load when running civ4?

Best regards
Bjarne, Denmark

 

[Fieryphoenix]

Gosh... play many games? Most games will run around 90-100 percent. Moreover, this is by design... the games are programmed to reserve the CPU cycles for themselves in order maximize the percieved responsiveness. They'll yield those cycles only grudgingly.

Note that Civ only runs "BelowNormal" when you have it minimized or if another window has the focus. If you run Civ 4 in a window and watch the priority as you switch back and forth, it will switch to "Normal" when the game is in focus.

Watching my own for a little now, I observe this behavior. While minmized, it occupies my 2nd processor about 10 percent. Thirty if it's minimized while loading a save game from a huge world. When in focus at the start screen, it takes about 80 percent for itself. When that huge game is loaded, a constant 95 percent.