For Modders and Players: Testing mods for CPU stress

[Sirandar888]

Note .... Call me educated on trust  .... Corsair ICUE takes 20-30  of your CPU when running Cyberpunk 2.13.  Without ICUE on HIGH I get about 80% CPU on all cores on Vanilla Cyberpunk  I7 13700 RTX4070  .... This procedure is even easier at 80 % CPU

No my cyberpunk install was so CPU sensitive as the IQ software was probably taking 40% of my CPU... Never even occurred to me because all the other games run fine because they're not even close to CPU bound. Even superposition ran well  with ICue  running amok

 

After much pain I have developed a method to figure out how much stress a given mod is inflicting on the cyberpunk script and streaming engine.

Cyberpunk pre-2.0 is a completely different beast than post ... so discretion is required use any mods not made well after 2.13.  Why? Pre 2.0 was GPU limited .... post CPU limited in most cases.  Modders didn't need to test CPU stress before because the mod had to be really bad to cause a problem

When a mod tanks the stream and script engine, FPS may not go down unless you are in a heavy spot and are moving the avatar or the camera.

So how do you figure out how much CPU a given mod is taking when the game is already at 100% CPU on all cores? 

1) Find a heavy spot with pedestrian and vehicular traffic and make a clean save.

2) From task manager load up the resources manager from the performance manager select CPU and make it big enough to see all cores

3) Find the Crowd Density setting where when you load up the clean save ... you just start to see little drops (1-5%) in the normally 100% cpu usage on all cores.  Then watch the CPU usage for a while with cyberpunk in the background ... the removes the overhead of the GPU on the CPU and usage should drop to about 80%.  If this doesn't happen reduce CPU setting further like crowd density and cascaded shadows.  If you cannot get little drops in CPU usage when in game  .... your system is NOT powerful enough to load any script mods and not have stutter and streaming weirdness, especially when moving or panning.

This is your baseline

4) Leave everything the same and repeat with each new mod you desire to have in game, adjusting each mod to your desired settings.  As long as you see little drops in CPU usage (5%) your stream and script engine is not saturated and the mod is CPU friendly.

Note the settings are important .... Nova Traffic Simple version is fine on my system as long as it only loads vanilla cars .... with a few custom cars the script/stream engine is maxxed. Which cars? How many I don't have the patience to test that.

Rinse and repeat for all your mods.

In my testing one single mod ...  Legacy - Enhanced Vehicle System-11765-16-5-1731102908 is enough to saturate my CPU moving to 100% all cores in game and from 80% CPU to 90% game in background  .... that 10% hurts and means that more mods may tank your system

Another mod, Inside The NCART Station-15212-1-0-2-1718639338 seems like it couldn't be CPU hungry .... but in my test it was.

Another mod LowQualityCrowdNoMore-11734-0-15-1726415394 just increased CPU enough to be detectable

In my testing I was very surprised that "Mr Cheddars" NPC mods didn't affect CPU usage much ... must be very judicious on how he/she attaches scripts to NPCs 

The best way to test the stream engine is to watch cars .....  once the  script/stream can't keep up the cars will start to hitch frequently at LOD transitions.  They sometime do this with NO mods but it is rare.

Carefully test ANY mod with the word fix in it especially if it applies or affects many assets at once like DecalsFlickeringFix-16579-0-12-1726542928 and Adverts Fixes  .... these mods need limiters IMO

NOTE! Failing this CPU test doesn't mean the mod is bad  ..... it means that if you want it in your load you are almost done adding CPU intensive mods.

NOTE!  Mods can interact and cause mayhem so combinations need testing too

You pretty much need MO2 and very stable hardware and OS to do this test.

Before this no matter how hard I tried I couldn't figure out which mods were problems for my load order 

[Sirandar888]

Lololololo ..... this just keeps getting better .....  I couldn't even uninstall Icue as there was no entry in the uninstall in Win 11 and the troubleshooter  ..... Never ever let this app auto-update .... it was a long nail-biting manual uninstall with no guidance but I know how 

At that point all my mods were perfectly working together and I was still never dropping below 70 fps ..... then when I was done suddenly and for no reason Cyberpunk dropped a consistent 20fps so I was dipping below 60.  Tried everything to get the 20 fps back  ... nothing worked. Even vanilla Cyberpunk on 1080p medium crowd 2k was barely clearing 60 fps.

But the mayhem continues as I explored why CPU was so limiting  .... the answer was that my Gigabyte Aorus Elite AX DDR4 motherboard with the latest BIOS locks the i7 13700 at 125W max which is only half of what it should be ... so my CPU is performing significantly worse than an i7 10700 on multicore.  Ironically I bought it as a highly advertised bundle from the most reputable dedicated Computer Store in the area.

Gigabyte probablly won't even respond to my support request .... and I doubt the computer store will care that they bundled an incompatible CPU/MO

It is just like a comedy of errors  .... including my own. 

[Sirandar888]

Well ... managed to sort out the issues with my system and Cyberpunk/mods

My original post still stands but it is much simpler ....  Go to a heavy spot and spin your camera around madly  ..... it your FPS drops below your min acceptable (60Hz) then your CPU and streaming engine is saturated or your vram is full and swapping.  If this happens your game is going to stutter no matter what tricks like DLSS or framegen  you use.

How did I fix?

Deleting and reinstalling ICue and keeping an eye on it.  I suspect Corsair was hacked and my version of Icue was compromised because it was almost impossible to uninstall.  The incompatibility with the latest version of Nvidia drivers may have really been a hack ... but who knows.

My CPU issues were  due to the strangest cause ..... basically my TDP for my processor wouldn't go above 125W and my CPU was underperforming and that is why my Cyberpunk was so CPU sensitive.

I blamed Gigabyte and the latest BIOS for not implementing TDP limits properly.  I blamed Intel for  throttling their CPUs because they screwed up.

Then I noticed what I should have realized immediately when I installed win11 ....  My system was only using half of its CPU cores. Nothing I did was CPU limited so I didn't even notice for months.

This was why my TDP only reached 50% max.

Why was it only using half of its cores .... because if you select selective startup in MSconfig  on my system it limited my system to 4 cores probably because when I had win10 I only had a 4 core system.

Running on all core my game is now both CPU and GPU limited depending on the situation  ... I chose crowd density on high over ray tracing as there are video showing people playing CP that in blind tests mostly couldn't even tell if RT was on unless they were trained to focus on certain things.  On a RTX4070 ....  4K is really not possible if you want a smooth stutter free game  .... vram has to be more than 12GB and the 4070 isn't powerful enough. 2K is optimal. It is ray tracing or crowd density on high  .... choose one

Note Intel did screw up royally and my CPU won't go above 200 watts when it should ramp up to 250 that is significant.... but better than a burned CPU.  no my CPU isn't throttling at least according to intel....

The good new it that this ordeal caused me to eliminate all the CPU  stressing mods from my load so my game runs like a dream. 

I can share my load order but nobody will read this anyway  .... lolololooo

PS ..... The programmers of Archive XL were masters  ..... no matter how many items and Ateliers you load up .... doesn't tank your game.

[Dragon32]

I for one would be interested in knowing what mods you've removed from your load order based on your testing.