Hot CPU: is this normal?

Hi, apologies for my lack of computer knowledge…

When I play this game, even without building a large airport, my laptop’s CPU can get quite hot (over 50 degrees).
Is this expected at this stage of development?
I’m a bit worried my laptop with get too hot and damaged. It does not seem to get this hot when I plan Football Manager (the only other game I play!).

I have a gaming laptop (specifications below); it is quite new.

Intel(R) Core™ i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz
8.00GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

Thanks for any responses.

Same thing here, the CPU is running above 50% all the time when running Airport CEO.

As windows user I always like to limit Airport CEO to just a few cores. When you are in Task Manager, you can go to the details of a program. Right click this program rule and choose “Set Affinity”. There you can limit the amount of CPU that can be eaten by Airport CEO. The 60% CPU on just having the game menu open is weird. When running large airports its get bigger and bigger over time. That’s why I just limit it, so you still can use the rest of your PC normally.

Taskmgr_2018-02-22_06-36-35

For the huge memory eating by Airport CEO I looked around to limit it with hard limits. There is however no native windows way to hard limit memory to a program. The most effective way I found was; run a VR system on your OS, limit the VR room memory allowance, run the program in the VR system. That I found funny.

Secondary, still find it weird that Airport CEO does not utilize your GPU at all.

Thank you very much for this reply - I think you have a much better knowledge of all of this than I do.

By limiting the amount of CPU the game can use (e.g. ticking CPU 0 and CPU 1, as you show in the image), I presume this will prevent my laptop getting so hot? The side effect may be that the game is slower, I guess?

Do you think that this problem (the CPU getting so hot) will improve as the game developers make progress?

Thanks again.

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As someone who knows about settings, I have no idea about programming, the DEV’s really have to tell you. But yes, I think the game can slow down somewhat. But will you notice? I dont.

But, by limiting the utilisation of your CPU, the cooler has a limited amount of CPU cycles warmth to process; so less CPU cycles, less heat, less to cool, etc… you see the picture?

Got it, thanks!
I’ll try this and hope the developers improve this later. It is an interesting game, but it seems to be demanding a lot of my laptop. Nothing else has made my laptop that hot.

Thanks for the responses…a great help.

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Realize game laptops are set up to cool down your Graphics processing unit (GPU) not your Processor (CPU). As noticed, Airport CEO does not utilize the GPU at all.

That’s why we wish ACEO to use GPU somehow.

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So on my laptop it is not a problem, that the CPU is getting hot. On normal usage my CPU achieves something around 45 degrees. While playing my CPU goes without any problem over 60+ degrees. I cant speak exactly for your Laptop, but in generally Laptop-CPU’s are build to be able to become hotter than desktop-CPU’s. Due to your specs your Laptop should never get a Problem with a game like this one.

One need to consider that Airport CEO is not very GPU intense. The Unity3D engine which is used by ACEO does utilize the GPU a lot, but the main part we have to look at are all those objects moving on the screen.

As the game is still in early development a lot of these things can be optimized. And stuff like pathfinding is always CPU heavy. Take other games like StarCraft 2 as an example. With all the units running around and the AI (if VS CPU) the pathing is the most expensive part except for the graphics.

Some old threads I found again about pathfinding in SC :slight_smile:
https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/648438-how-to-do-starcraft-2-pathfinding/
https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/597457-pathfinding-in-a-space-based-rts-game/

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What I always wondered, can’t pre-caching of paths not happen in a separate thread on GPU? Then the live-pathfinder can pull from the pre-cached data when a path is available and render a new one if it is not (and then add that path to the cache).

Pathfinding is definitely not done on gpu.
You can cache paths of course to save some cpu cycles, but caching that info is in ram

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My CPU while playing…

My computer is still very usable. Having 24GB of RAM may also help. Though I don’t find the game uses that much of it. About 4.5GB as of now.

As of 20th June, 2018, my CPU is still getting very hot (60-70 °C)…before I have even built anything.

I am beginning to think this game is unplayable right now, if I want to keep my CPU alive and well?

I have limited my time on this game, as I don’t want to damage my laptop. Does anyone have any insights into whether this issue will improve?

What are your hardware specs?

50 degrees is really not hot… CPUs thermal throttle at 90 degrees.

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Have you dusted of your CPU recently? Dust layers on electronics component tend to make cooling efforts less effective. In excess of that I agree with BBoyJD10, if your CPU was at 90 I’d be more worried. How does your CPU perform playing other games with the same kind of application strain (I.e. a larger city in Cities: Skyline)?

I have a gaming laptop (specifications below); it is quite new.

Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz
8.00GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

I only play Football Manager, and this (AirportCEO).
It does not get anywhere near as hot playing Football Manager.
60-70 °C…before I have even built anything, on a fairly new laptop - is this game more suited to a desktop computer?

I play on a laptop and never noticed it heating up.

I play on a 15" Macbook Pro with a 2,9 GHz Intel Core i7 and 16GB of memory and my CPU is always used 300%+ when running ACEO. The fan is also blowing pretty hard and sounds like a plane, so nice for the surrounding sound effect but after a while it gets annoying.