Tip to Lower GPU Usage

General Discussion
1

Grass, shrubs and trees seem to be the culprit that is baking the GPU in this game. Mainly the grass.

I was able to reduce the GPU usage considerably by lowering the resolution scale slider from 100 to 75. This dropped my GPU usage standing in town from ~80% down to about ~35%.
The downside of doing this is that it makes everything blurry, however you can ramp up the sharpness slider to counter that.

Right now my settings are 75 resolution scale, 50 sharpness and it looks decent.

I’m using a GTX 1080 Ti. Your mileage may vary. I hope this helps.

2

Thanks for the information. But don’t be afraid when your GPU is using 100%. It is designed for this. But, there should be good cooling of the case and the GPU itself. I have a GTX 1060 (6Gb) loaded at 100% and warms up to 67° maximum and keeps it like this all the time that I play. On your GPU, the temperature will be higher, since the GPU is more powerful. But do not worry, GPU manufacturers know what they are doing and your card will not fail, if only the cooling in the case is done correctly. And even if not, then the GPU as well as the CPU has built-in trottling programs, if the temperature is APPROACHING critical, and these programs will not allow the equipment to fail.

3

The GPU baking is because the game tries to give you maximum possible framerate.
Go to NVIDIA control panel and limit FPS to 60 and it’ll be fine. I did this to go from 86c to 60c.

4

This game drops a hammer on my GTX 960 like nothing else. Straight to 80c and thermal throttle. It pegs the power to 120W constant like it is mining eth in the background. I usually play ESO on that system, and even Alik’r anchor trains with 100 players doesn’t send it there. D2 hardest game to run since Crysis lol

5

Hey, thanks for the tip - if I have 144hz monitor and wanna play OW for example at max settings do I have to go back into the nvidia panel and increase FPS rate?

6

Depending on how you set the setting up. You can do it globally, so it affects ALL your games, or ideally you can click the Browse button, find the game.exe file inside the D2R folder and then apply the FPS cap on that file only.

7

fps limit to 60 at nvidia control panel (at “manage 3D settings”) is the easiest way.

8

There is a reason people dont buy 2nd handed mining GFX card. Prolong maxing out your gfx load is not healthy. Gfx cards are very expensive now, not worth it to break 1 for an unoptimised game. Reducing all the resolution and setting down to nothing also dont make sense either. You dont pay 40 usd for a “graphic” remaster and then turn them all down. Neither was the game using high end tech like ray trace to warrant such a burn. Feels like a simple unoptimised product thats all. Nothing wrong with our hardware.

9

True, the graphics card should be able to handle running at 100% load. However, with high temps comes the problem of thermal throttling. A lot of graphics cards don’t ramp the fans up very fast in order to keep them quiet. [edit: proper case airflow is important… The graphics card is expecting that. :] You can see your performance drop by a large amount when throttling kicks in. The same problem happens with processors. A good example being Intel chips with their cheap stock coolers. “Oh yeah, 95 Celsius is juuuuuust fine!” says Intel. What a load of crap.

I have the NVidia GTX 1080Ti Founder Edition, I have MSI Afterburner running solely to adjust the fan curve to be more aggressive to keep the temps at or below 75 Celsius. No thermal throttling, ever. If I disable MSI Afterburner, the card will thermal throttle under 100% load.

I have an AMD Ryzen 9 3900x with the MASSIVE BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 4, it keeps the temps on maximum load (prime95) at around 80 Celsius all while maintaining a 4.2Ghz clock boost. The only tweak that is turned on is precision boost overdrive.

The higher the temperature the chip is, the more power the chip has to use under load, which accelerates the electromigration process.

10

thank you, update FPS in nvidia control panel hovers 60c rtx 2070

11

My 2080 Super was drawing 245-250W at the character select menu and in game. Setting a max frame rate of 60 FPS drops it down to around 110W.

Grim Dawn was maxing out around 140W with around 20 pets summoned and tons of mobs on screen.

D3 hit around 115W, but not for long.

Anyway, definitely some optimizations to be made.

12

Yes, the current optimization is very bad… on 4K with 1080Ti and everything on LOW or OFF, in fight with some mobs i have about 30-40 FPS… When I look into chest FPS will drop to some 10 - 15, same traders

13

My fans were kicking on and off constantly so I just decided to limit it to 60 fps. Still solid look but very stable.

14

i have FPS limit in nvidia control panel for D2 res to 60 - unchanged

15

This game was never about the graphics - that said lowering the Resolution scale to 75-50 will greatly improve performance and barely dimimish the graphics appearance … IMO… I did this as well and have 60 FPs consistantly …

16

They should add max foreground/background FPS options like they have in D3. Yes, I said it… D3… :rofl:

17

What program is everyone using to monitor their GPU? Task manager or?
So far my GPU isnt working hard, higher temp though…
Steady 15-30% and 78-81c

18

Task manager for usage. MSI Afterburner for temp. (system tray) I could use just MSI afterburner, but it eats up more resources with the GUI running.

Well I guess task manager shows the temp as well.

19

I thought maybe you meant to show the Wattage.

20

I just got so used to seeing the usage in task manager and the temp in MSI afterburner. They recently added the temp in task manager.