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Minetest under used CPU/RAM/GPU

PostPosted: Tue Sep 16, 2014 15:57
by Minetestforfun
I play Minetest from 2 / 3 months, and I am surprised how Minetest used under the processor, graphical card and ram of my computers

After several tests with different versions on Windows's builds (sfan5, Fess and version available from the official website) the FPS are still at the lowest...
While with the version of Celeron55 we always win between 5 and 20 FPS only for Linux operating system,
and with the Morn76's build for OSX, i think it's like Linux builds.

Here are my conclusions :

(Windows and Linux)
On a desktop computer with i3, GTX 570 and 8GB of RAM : CPU used at 5-10%, GPU used at 5-10%, and 20-25% RAM => 35/45 FPS (with maximal graphics)
Normally I should easily have between 60 and 120 FPS

(Windows and Linux)
On a desktop computer with a i7, 680GTX*2 and 16GB of RAM : CPU used at 5-10%, GPU under 5%, 15-20% RAM => 50 / 65 FPS (with maximal graphics)
Normally I should easily have between 120 and 240 FPS

(Windows and Linux)
On a laptop with a Dual Core 1.8Ghz, ION II GPU and 4GB of RAM : CPU 40/60%, GPU 45/65% and RAM 60/80% (SWAP not used) => 15 / 30 FPS (with minimal graphics)
Normally I should easily have between 30 and 60 FPS

(Windows and Linux)
On a laptop with a Dual Core 1.6Ghz, Intel GMA 3600 and 4GB of RAM : CPU 50/70%, GPU 70/85% and RAM 60/80% (SWAP not used) => 10 / 25 FPS (with minimal graphics)
Normally I should easily have between 30 and 60 FPS

(Windows and OSX)
On a MacBook Pro end-2011 with an i3, Intel GMA 3xxx (with more dedicated memory because of the amount of RAM) and 16GB RAM : CPU 30/50%, GPU 40/60%, RAM 20/30% => 25/40 FPS (with minimal graphics)
Normally I should easily have between 60 and 120 FPS

i found this results very strange... can you brighten me ?

Re: Minetest under used CPU/RAM/GPU

PostPosted: Tue Sep 16, 2014 16:07
by rubenwardy
Minetest doesn't use very many threads. Most of the processing is in one thread. Therefore there is an imbalance between the work loads of cores.

Re: Minetest under used CPU/RAM/GPU

PostPosted: Tue Sep 16, 2014 17:22
by sfan5
How did you measure the GPU usage?

Re: Minetest under used CPU/RAM/GPU

PostPosted: Tue Sep 16, 2014 21:14
by Minetestforfun
@rubenwardy
Indeed, this is a big problem...

@sfan5
I measure the GPU usage mostly with "MSI Afterburn" (it's a powerful tool, also useful for soft overclocking)

Re: Minetest under used CPU/RAM/GPU

PostPosted: Wed Sep 17, 2014 16:21
by sfan5
Minetestforfun wrote:I measure the GPU usage mostly with "MSI Afterburn" (it's a powerful tool, also useful for soft overclocking)

And how did you measure the GPU usage on Mac OS X or Linux?

Re: Minetest under used CPU/RAM/GPU

PostPosted: Wed Sep 17, 2014 22:09
by Minetestforfun
Win***s : MSI Afterburn > GPU-Z > CUDA-Z
OS X : CUDA-Z > Wine
Linux : nvidia-smi > Open Hardware Monitor > CUDA-Z > Wine

My monitoring GPU software, try it in order, if one doesn't work, just try the next one ! :)

Re: Minetest under used CPU/RAM/GPU

PostPosted: Sun Aug 23, 2015 08:39
by Cyberpangolin
Hi!
I want to add my statistics about that:
Core i7-4771 @ 3.5 GHz
8GB Ram
nvidia geForce GTX 760, with 2GB dedicated.
LinuxMint 17.2 Raphaela
As you see, it's not a quite old or slow machine.

The good thing: minetest runs smoothly at normal viewing ranges (minimum viewing distance = 100; max = 3000). I usually lock it @30fps to avoid useless energy consumption, and I get 45 fps if I unlock . Even in 2560x1440. yes.

The bad thing: My gpu is used at 30% only, but my cpu is used on one core at 100%. It means I could probably double my minimum viewing distance if it was "correctly" multithreaded. Or I should have much more fps.

I noticed my cpu usage depends of the number of nodes displayed. Maybe we could have a big improvement by splitting the screen in 2/3/how much you want vertical bands, and every core would have one band to make calculation on.
The another thread should summarize these to communicate with the gpu.
I'm no programmer, I don't know at all how you make it, but I'm sure it's possible. My apologizes if it's a bad idea or if someone else already talked about it.