Light/reflection computing for water uses CPU?

I got around to test this on official map without mods and those seem to balance out CPU load with water and are not causing same kind of single core load, so I guess this should be on Bob's South California map thread, or mod bug thread.


I have noticed big increase in one cpu core load when there is water on sight or at direction camera is facing.

That happens when light quality is set to anything but the lowest setting, other settings can be lowest and I can still get 100% on one core if light quality is set to highest. I noticed this with a mod map and mod car, haven't tested with original content yet, so this might be at wrong section.

Shader quality from normal to high is about same CPU usage on that core (cpu 4), light quality from low to high all settings again about the same.

Light quality at lowest or shader quality at low or lowest seems to have less load on cpu 4.

I'm curious as I thought those would be computed on GPU instead of CPU, but is water with reflections somehow different on that as it seems to be when water is on direction camera is facing this happens?

I guess future updates make changes to this, I don't know how difficult it would be, but based on what I have found out playing with settings, it might help performance if computing for what is related to light quality option and what is related to shader quality option, would run in different threads, but making that happen might be difficult or impossible.

Also it might be that with more powerful GPU cpu might not get loaded this way, but I don't have information about that.
Dynamic reflection was not on.


Vsync and FPS limiter were on, so CPU waits GPU on 2nd grab, but I think you get the picture.



Here is graph with vsync off and fps limiter off for a good measure, I guess it just shows GPU is chocking.