Why am I getting high CPU usage?

Hello guys, I’m playing around in the UE4 engine because I plan to use it in the near future but I’ve noticed that my CPU Usage goes all the way up to 100% every time I compile shaders. I don’t understand why because I’m connected to a decent GPU (760 superclocked) and my CPU is a 4690k. I also noticed that it uses approximately 50% of my CPU when not compiling shaders. Is this normal or is there a setting somewhere I have to change? Thanks for the help in advance.

The short answer is yes this is normal. As far as I know shaders go thru your processor before being sent out to your graphics card. There’s ways to have a GPU compute shaders directly (google CUDA/GPGPU etc) but for a game engine it’s very common to rely on both. This is similar for building and encoding lighting, where each thread in your CPU takes on Unreal’s Lightmass.

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