so, you know how sometimes you're playing a game or running a bunch of programs and you check your windows task manager to see how much cpu power is being used? well, it turns out that the numbers it shows might not be entirely accurate. i've heard some people complaining about this before, but i never really thought about it too much - i just kinda assumed that task manager knew what it was doing.



but apparently, the creator of the original task manager, dave plummer, recently made a video explaining how it actually calculates cpu usage, and it's way more complicated than i thought. it's not just a simple matter of checking how much power is being used at any given moment - there are all these underlying calculations and averages that go into it. and get this, it's not even based on the time between gui refreshes, which is what i would have guessed. instead, it's based on the total cpu time used by all processes between each sample.



i don't know about you, but this all sounds pretty confusing to me. i mean, i just want to know how much cpu power my games are using, not get a lesson in computer science. but i guess it's interesting to learn about how this stuff works behind the scenes. and it's good to know that microsoft is working on a fix for this, so that task manager will be more accurate in the future. they recently announced a change to how task manager calculates cpu usage, which should make it more consistent with industry standards.



one thing that's kind of weird is that task manager is basically creating a "useful fiction" to give us a cpu utilisation figure. it's not a direct measurement, but rather an average of what's been happening recently. i'm not sure how i feelRead more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com

What do you think about this?