Video Card (GPU) Usage?

[Accurate]

My card is a nVidia GTX 550 1gb memory not overclocked.

Even the menus of TS2013 runs the card at 80%. Normal views in the rail yard, or out in the woods on a single line with no locomotive or cars, the card runs at 99%. There are no bad effects. FPS are in 30 to 40 range where there are many trains in a yard to 80fps for a single engine (no cars) on a single line in the woods.

So, no complaints but I was surprised at the high GPU usage even on menus. THX on no impact. Anti-alais lowest setting.

One other note: Is there a place to set the Affinity value besides the Task Mgr.? My i5 2500 shows mostly core zero being used. If I remove zero from TS2013 the other three seem to have a better distributed usage.

[Chacal]

One other note: Is there a place to set the Affinity value besides the Task Mgr.?

I use Process Lasso.
In my experience, playing with CPU affinity quickly became a maintenance nightmare and rarely gave noticeable results.

[buzz456]

With all due respect I find it hard to believe that turning TSX on or off does nothing to usage. Also anytime with older cards anytime I got anywhere near 100% usage a game crash followed shortly.

[Ericmopar]

Yeah, it will do that if V-Sync isn't enabled in the CP.
The GPU will run full tilt.
I use V-Sync for two reasons.
1. It smooths out game play immensely on my setup.
2. It keeps things running at a lower temp.

The trade off is slower load times, but since I usually play for an hour or more that extra time doesn't bother me much.

[Accurate]

As I write this I have the Graphics Options window open on the desktop as well. I am see a 77% load on the GPU. I tried the formal Lowest and Highest settings as well as fiddling with individual settings and still see the load. There is no overheat and the the fan copes ok. If I Minimize RW menu the GPU usage drops to 1%. Another monitoring program shows the same usage. FPS are quite acceptable and the game/simulation(?) runs smoothly most of the time.

With the natural gas boom here I really do not need electric heating from the GPU.

[Accurate]

The VSYNC ON reduced the GPU usage in the program scenerio to 38%. The menus still give a 99% GPU load but not an issue.
Thanks.