I have been using MSI Afterburner for several years now as it is one of the best GPU overclocking tools and it makes sense to use it as it also helps you monitor the real-time stats that include usage, temperature, fps, frame times, and much more.
Similarly, there are other popular tools like CapFrameX and Intel PresentMon that are used by professional GPU reviewers for GPU testing. Currently, CapFrameX utilizes PresentMon because the latter on its own cannot collect data and doesn’t have a user-friendly interface.
So, Intel has made a big change in its software that is not only getting enhanced data collection features and a better user-friendly interface, it is also going to boast a brand new metric called GPU Busy.
GPU Busy is something that totally changes how the performance of any hardware in games can be monitored more accurately and allow users to understand what is going wrong at the backend. Unlike the frametime which is currently the most popular metric to understand stutters in a game, GPU busy will focus more on how a GPU is being used in real-time.
To understand this, Intel has revealed its working where it shows how GPU busy will function. Unlike Frametime which covers three segments including Wait, Game, and Render, GPU Busy will extend its functionality towards another Wait Section bringing in more data to understand how the GPU is working.
So, if the GPU is 100% at any point it will mean that there is a performance bottleneck from the GPU side at that point in a game but if it is lower than 100%, it means that it is bottlenecking from the CPU side.
The conventional metrics of CPU and GPU usage don’t collect this type of data and therefore, analyzing both GPU Busy and Frametime will help in understanding not only the possible bottleneck from the hardware but also the problems in game optimizations.
Now the interesting thing here to see is that even though this metric can be used directly from PresentMon, CapFrameX has announced that it is working to integrate the latest version making CapFrameX one of the first tools to feature GPU Busy Metric.
With this addition, I hope that popular GPU reviewers will adapt to newer formats to test new GPUs so that we can get an even more detailed analysis.
