CoH -- Give me back my CPU (pls!?)

The short version:

Why is CoX running my CPU at 90-100% resolution when rendering 3D scenes (i.e. not character creation, enh management, etc.)??

The long version:

I started religiously monitoring heat and CPU usage on all my machines in the last few weeks. On my main gaming desktop, I've got a proc that's a couple years old, but well within spec for CoX: AMD X2 5600+. Graphics card is nVidia GTX 280, well above spec.

When running the game, the GPU doesn't work too hard, but my poor CPU is pegged at ~100% the whole time. I've tried changing every option in graphics & audio settings, but nothing affects the CPU usage (not texture quality, not particle physics, not suppression, not bloom, not detail level, not draw distance, not screen resolution, not hardware v software sound playback, not... well, you get the picture.)

Whenever a 2D screen is displayed, though (e.g. managing enhancements, creating a character), CPU usage drops to about 40%. So there's something going on there that's related to the rendering pipeline... but WHAT IS IT, and how can I lower my CPU utilization when playing the game?

I'm happy to do a DxDiag dump, but not sure how that would help; I have no artifacts or really any GPU-related rendering or perf issues with the game. I just want to not be pegging my CPU at 100% for a six hour play session.

Note that I don't see the same problem running more GPU-intensive FPS style games (e.g. Fallout, Crysis, UT3, etc.), so it seems like something engine-specific.

There is nothing wrong with your system. That's just how CoX runs.

Doc is right, that *IS* the nature of this game. Its going to stand your CPU full bore open. Its going to do it whether you have a single core P4 or a high end dual core (maybe a quad too for all I know). Its not your pc, its the game, and its not particularly a problem assuming you have a pc with adaquate airflow and minimal dustbunnies.

I doesn't do this on my Quad Core either. I easily run CoH with Fallout 3, a web browser, e-mail client, messenger, and my music player all at the same time with no lag in either of them.

CoH only uses between 25% to 40% of my CPU (combined) at most.

It doesn't even do it on my dual core. CoH uses no more than 60% on both cores.

From the many CPUs I've owned while I've played CoH, I've seen CoH use 60-90% of P4, Athlon, Opteron, C2D. On my phenom (quad core) it uses about 40% tops. It's just extremely CPU intensive for a game.

sounds like the cpu is a bottleneck ..it cant keep pace with the gpu.. hence the 90-100% usage

yeah with my quad a can run several games even coh

Just looking at the CPU is misleading. The CPU also has to juggle bus requests and data transfers, so if you are RAM starved, your CPU will grind away having to manage all the swap space with the disk drive. Having a loaded disk drive will also cause additional grinding, same for unoptimized. Also, consider your sound. If you are driving the sound from multiple process, your sound card might not be able to handle the simultanious audio and will rely on your CPU to sort out the data.

Tl;dr version: One metric doesnt begin to explain your issue.