GPU always at 100% despite fps cap

[Anubis]

About opening PC case - let me explain a little about physics.

Of course the perfectly built system should have a perfect airflow inside the closed case and everything should be fine.
But we are not living in a perfect world. For example - I use a closed loop all-in-one watercooler for CPU - the problem with this solution is, that although silent and more effective, it must be on the back of the PC case (attatched to the cooling grille.) there is a radiator and a fan that blows through this radiator. How can this be a problem ? Very simple - the air that gets blown through the fan and radiator is the same air that comes in from the front of the PC, heating up while passing from the hard drives and the GPU. If I open up the case, then the fan can gets the air right next to it and CPU temp is lower. This is pure physics - the fresh air that hasn't touched the other components is always cooler. I have a good case and good fans in a rigt places, everything is built correctly (I've built PCs about 20 years) There is a possibility to cut a hole into the side of the PC and put a pipe from the hole to the CPU fan, but that would have to be as big as the diameter of the fan (14 cm) and it would look ugly as hell. No.

And to be honest - I could create a cooling profile for the fans that enables me to play with closed case and everything would be cool inside.
But then it would be just too loud. (I have sensitive hearing)

So, it is my personal preference - if I have to choose between a loud noise and an open PC case - I choose the open PC case. (It's easily opened - like putting a window on a ventilation position)

This all is exclusive to playing modded Skyrim only, there is no need to open PC case when playing other games, so pointless to cut holes in PC and change the fan profile for one game. But this also indicates that there is something wrong with the Skyrim. Which was my whole point.

[ENBSeries]

Dude, im paranoid about noise, so i even glued foam rubber from inside and hdds are on scythe antivibration thing mouned. Be Quiet fan 120mm with 70% is enough for cooling my system and no noise except in the night i can hear videocard when running game and some hdds when they are busy. It's not about compromise between one and another, it's just possible to have cold and quiet system easily.

[Anubis]

You try modding Skyrim heavily (over 300 mods, most of them graphical mods for 4K resolution) and have a monitor with a resolution 3840x1600. Every graphical setting at maximum. Believe me - system will get very hot. And then it will be a compromise.
(To be correct I can play Skyrim without opening my PC case, but then my CPU would get to 68C and this makes me feel uncomfortable. Opening the case does not change the GPU temp though)

As I said - playing other games is not a problem - everything is cool and quiet.

So, if someone is concerned, that their GPU usage is high during Skyrim, then this seems normal to me. (bought my last graphic card because of that)

[CSnews]

Guys,

I only registered to say: thank you!

After 3 months of Skyrim absence (lost my pc and all backups in a fire) I just spent a long weekend to install, rediscover & reinstall most of my favorite mods from Nexus' download history and re-create my custom NPCs from scratch again. Then I ran into the same problem like 2 years before with broken textures and CTDs, and I remembered that ENBseries fixed it back then.

After installing, I ran into the same problem like Anubis with high GPU temp and annoying fan speed & noise (RTX 2080 Ti @ 3840x2160).

Only after reading THIS thread I noticed that my Skyrim is actually running at 140fps with ENB installed. Setting fps cap to 60 in NVIDIA control panel fixed this problem for me. Now I'm back, stable & silent! Thx!!

[KiranDovahkiin]

I'm resuming this thread because I have the same issue.

I recently bought a new pc. With my previous pc the gpu usage has never been an issue and my gpu temps while gaming with enb enabled never went beyond 70 °C.
My old pc specs:
- i7 4790 @ 3.60GHz
- 16 Gb RAM
- GeForce GTX 970 (old driver version 442.19)
- Win 7 x64

Now I have:
- i7 10700KF @ 3.80GHz
- 16 Gb RAM
- GeForce RTX 3060 (new driver version 466.47)
- Win 10 20H2

When I play Skyrim or Fallout 4 with enb enabled, the gpu usage goes up to a constant 100%, while the temperature is around 75-76 °C. This does not happen with enb for Fallout 3/NV or Oblivion, in which case the gpu usage is around 50%. Neither did it happen with a couple of other unmodded games (Detroit Become Human and Shadow of the Tomb Raider).

The only way to lower the gpu usage and temperature is using enb's limiter to cap the framerate to values lower than 60 (which is the max framerate my display supports, at 1080p). The lower the framerate, the lower the gpu usage.

I have tried what worked for mfg_immo, that is disabling enb's fps cap and v-sync and enabling fps cap in nvidia control panel, but it didn't work.

Is there a way to run Skyrim and Fallout 4 with enb while keeping 60 fps and a lower percentage of gpu usage, just like Fallout 3 and NV and Oblivion?

Thanks.

[ENBSeries]

Change game video setting and mod effects (their quality too). There are too many factors which affect this and for end user gpu usage is useless parameter. In your case it usually means that for your rig and your game cpu is fast enough to feed videocard, but videocard is not able to handle it. There is absolutely nothing bad at 100% of cpu or gpu usage. If you want to lower noise or make videocard live longer there is no option but reduce performance by vsync, fps limit and move gpu usage to cpu usage by tweaking effects. Or better downclock videocard, way better to make it last longer (but not sure if modern cards can be downclocked properly as i did to gtx650ti, cause they underclock themselves based on load).

[KiranDovahkiin]

Yes, underclocking the gpu is one thing I tried, but it still makes the fps go down.

How do I tweak effects in order to move gpu usage to cpu usage? By lowering their quality? The cpu usage for Skyrim is very low, around 15%, so giving the cpu more work should not be an issue.

[ENBSeries]

You can assign game to just few cpu cores to raise cpu usage. There is no solution which works without degrading performance or quality. Regarding effects, simply reduce them to have higher framerate. Sometime on the contrary works, but that's mostly cause of bad syncing between cpu and gpu as things done in parallel. Playing with Max Prerendered Frames parameter in nvidia control panel may help too (but usually at cost of performance, unless set something hight, above 3).

[KiranDovahkiin]

I prefer great visuals over high frame rate. So, after trying everything, I think the best compromise for me is capping the frame rate at 50, which is still good after all.

Thank you Boris.