Normally I don’t pay that much attention to the start menu as I quickly click through it to start up a game. But this morning I was replying to a forum thread and left it open while I was replying and to my surprise my fan started to blow like normally it does in game… So I checked the activity monitor and encountered a 300+ usage of the CPU by ACEO… For the record I play ACEO on a pretty high-spec MacBook Pro 15" (up to last week), so should be a walk in the park to just display a pretty static start menu of a game…
Do other people encounter this issue as well? Is this expected behaviour? Is the game already loading all kinds of ‘stuff’ that eats up the CPU? Or is there ‘just’ a pre allocation of CPU resources by the game regardless if you use it, because if I’m in game I see the same amount of CPU usage. I’m interested if this is also the case with other Mac users and if Windows users experience this as well?
I’m playing at resolution 2560x1600 with graphics quality ‘Good’ and using the AMD Radeon Pro 560 graphics card. Does the internal graphic card make a difference? You would think that the extra, more powerful AMD graphic card would be better, right?
For test I’ve loaded the start menu with the intel card and the AMD Radeon, results:
Intel: CPU between 250-270 to 300-310
AMD: CPU between 480 to 510
@Olof For comparison, I play at 21560x1440 (I might look at 1600 though) with an AMD R9 M395X with 4GB of Graphics RAM and I get a lot of usage as well. This is on the loading screen as well and the fan is loud. On the graph it’s quite clear when I opened the game. CPU is a 4 GHz Intel Core i7
Well, the main menu is not completely undemanding as the visuals are rendered in real time. You have several clouds that are moving about the screen but especially you have several aircraft with particle generation (the smoke) which is what I presume is causing the high load. But 604 percent doesn’t only sound weird but should be impossible, Unity is a bit of a black box in how it operates behind the curtain so we should probably take a look at it when we have time.
@Rubble Do you play on a iMac? Or did you boost your CPU to 4Ghz?
@Olof Would be cool if you could do some digging on the CPU usage as it is also high in game, but maybe more logical after the overhaul to the new Unity version and when there is more time to look into this. I will try the intel graphics as well as a test to see if that makes any difference, but again it is a bit weird that the on board graphic card is causing less CPU load than the Radeon.
Cool that all is rendered real time! Maybe an idea to disable the effects on settings lower than ‘Good’
For the record I play ACEO on a pretty high-spec MacBook Pro 15" (up to last week), so should be a walk in the park to just display a pretty static start menu of a game…
