Finding out where your gaming PC might be falling short is trickier than you think. Simply looking at Task Manager's report of CPU and GPU usage only gives you a limited glimpse into what might be your bottleneck, but is certainly not conclusive.
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In their quest to further bolster the GPU side of their business, Intel produced a user-friendly version of the PresentMon process, which is a tool used to measure critical performance metrics outside the basics found in Task Manager. Here are 5 reasons why it's far more powerful than other system monitors for finding PC bottlenecks.
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5 "GPU Busy" is a great metric for measuring bottlenecks
Allows you to see if your CPU is lagging behind
It's actually uncommon for games to put a full load on both the CPU and GPU; most lean one way or the other, and users often become GPU or CPU bound. This means that either component could be holding back the other from pushing out more frames. This is where the metric of "GPU busy" comes in. For some quick background, "frametime" is the measure of how long it takes for what is happening in your game to make it to your screen, measured in milliseconds (ms). GPU busy takes that frametime metric and isolates the GPU processing time only, and Intel PresentMon gives you a nifty graph to see the delta between the two.
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In the screenshot above, I've loaded up Escape From Tarkov, which is an FPS game that loves CPUs with good single-core performance and feasts on the CPU's cache. This illustrates perfectly why you shouldn't rely on GPU and CPU usage percentages alone. My CPU and GPU usage are both darting around 40%, which may give the impression that they're both being utilized equally, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
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When you look at the frametime average versus the GPU busy average, you see a very different story. It does not take my GPU very long to produce frames, only about 4 ms, but it waits a significant amount of time to receive those frames, resulting in lower FPS. In other words, my system has a CPU bottleneck when playing this game under these conditions.
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Here I've loaded up Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 to illustrate this point further. I've cranked the settings to Ultra to make sure I'm GPU bound this time, and as you can see, my GPU busy time aligns with the total frametime. This tells us that there's no CPU bottleneck, and my GPU is being consistently fed with frames to render. Instead of relying on usage percentages only, GPU busy allows you to see what part of your system is actually overloaded.
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4 Cross-platform support
AMD and NVIDIA users, rejoice!
Close
Despite it having "Intel" in the name, it's not exclusive to Intel platforms. NVIDIA and Radeon GPUs can both be monitored by Intel PresentMon. AMD processor support is also included, so nobody on the Red Team feels left out. There have been some reports on the GitHub page of users not being able to see their CPU telemetry on Ryzen systems, but this seems to have been resolved.
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3 Capture data without an overlay
Bulk collection made incredibly easy
Intel PresentMon is also able to capture data while the overlay is hidden. You can set how long you want the capture to be and set a hotkey to begin data capture. Data is captured in the .csv format and can be viewed in your spreadsheet application of choice. You might not be bottlenecked as much in some games compared to others, so collecting data might be useful for you.
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2 Comprehensive list of system metrics to track
All the key telemetry is monitored and displayed
Besides GPU busy, Intel PresentMon can track a laundry list of system metrics. There are some preset modes, like "Basic" and "Power/Temp" which focus on specific metrics, but the most useful one to me is "GPU Focus." GPU focus has the GPU busy metric front and center. If that's not enough for you, you can customize the overlay to feature essentially anything you want to measure, along with the color of the graphs.
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1 It's an open-source utility
There are some applications that work really well alongside it
Source: capframex.com
One of my personal favorite things about Intel PresentMon is the open-source nature of it. Because its source code is available, other applications have been made to interface with it easily. For example, AMD's OCAT(Open Capture Analysis Tool) is actually based on Intel PresentMon's libraries. If you need to capture graphs of frametimes and analyze potential stuttering, CapFrameX, which is pictured above, is a great tool for doing exactly that and is based directly on Intel PresentMon.
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Don't rely on just one tool
Task Manager and other performance measuring tools can only tell you bits and pieces of the story. Before going out and splashing cash on a new piece of hardware, it's important to make sure you're replacing the right component in your rig. Otherwise, you risk being even more limited in your performance than you were before.
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