Why is my CPU activity affected in this way?

[danangleland]

While playing Civ 5 I have noticed a lot of CPU activity (30-40% by Civ alone), even during my own turn when I am doing literally nothing (not clicking on anything or even moving the mouse, so the screen stays still). Alt-tabbing or playing in strategic view just about halves the CPU activity (I am measuring the activity in Task Manager). While playing tonight in strategic view for an extended period of time (roughly twenty minutes; I have never used it for more than a few seconds at a time before), I found trying to change back to the normal view froze the game for a second or two, apparently being a bigger deal than it was to change between them when I haven't spent a long time in strategic view. I have four questions:

Does the constant CPU work occur for other/all players?

Does the CPU activity fall for you when in strategic view?

Does anyone know why the CPU is working all the time when apparently there is nothing whatsoever to do?

Why is the CPU rather than the graphics card affected by the use of strategic view?

By the way, I am way over the minimum specs and though I play with medium graphics settings and often on huge maps in DX11, playing in DX9 on small maps and with low graphical settings doesn't alleviate the problem of rampaging CPU activity and CTDs (which I presume are related).

My specs: 3ghz AMD Quad core, 4gb RAM, 768mb GTX 460.

Thankyou in advance for any helpful responses.

 

[timtofly]

If you are only using 4 Gig ramm, I would assume that the use of a swap file would be a lot of that. All of the game animations, and I think that they run it as an active HTML page would call for constant CPU usage.

 

[Mark Havel]

It's a 32 bit executable and it's therefore unable to allocate more than 2 Gb of RAM. And usually, I don't see many games using much more than 1 Gb modulo 20%. I don't know what is so wrong with a game using CPU even when you don't feel it's doing many significant things. Look at any other game and you'll see it use at least as many CPU as Civ V. Computing the graphics are only a part of the equation. Once the graphic card has done it, it still leaves the sound, handling inputs, menus, coordinating the whole game and applying all the game's rules while you move units, not to mention using the AI to know whether it'll accept a deal you might propose it and at what price. And I'm sure I forgot things in the process.

The bottom line is that's it is a perfectly normal and usual behaviour.

 

[PostConsumerWat]

I think I noticed a jump in CPU activity since the expansion... it might just be my imagination though... ;o