What are heavy CPU tasks?

What are heavy CPU tasks? Let's find out

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You’ll hear the terms “CPU heavy” and “GPU heavy” being used frequently within the PC community. Today, we’re answering the question: What are heavy CPU tasks?

Now Read: CPU-intensive games

We’ll tell you what makes a task CPU-heavy and share with you some examples of CPU-heavy tasks. 

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What is a CPU-heavy task?

A CPU-heavy task is one that requires a lot of processing power from your CPU. These are typically tasks that involve lots of complex calculations or tasks that have a lot of elements that need to be dealt with simultaneously, increasing how hard your processor has to work. 

CPU vs. GPU heavy

By contrast, a GPU-heavy task is one that requires your GPU (graphics processing unit) to deliver more performance. CPU and GPU heavy are relative terms. Most tasks utilize one or the other, or both, at the same time and to varying extents. 

Gaming, for example, is an activity that requires both your CPU and your GPU to work together. Games can either be CPU or GPU-heavy, but most are GPU-heavy because your GPU does the heavy lifting in generating the graphics you see on your screen. 

Games that are CPU heavy usually involve complex AI or NPC behavior or have many elements on the screen at the same time.

Battle simulators, for example, usually have pretty simple graphics which end up making them easy on the GPU, but your CPU can have to deal with and process interactions between thousands of individual soldiers to produce the results you see on your screen. 

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What are some examples of CPU-heavy tasks?

Some examples of CPU-heavy tasks are: 

• Gaming. Games in the RTS, open-world, and simulation genre, or games that incorporate realistic physics are often quite CPU-heavy. 
• Streaming. Streaming by itself isn’t too demanding, but the fact is that most streams involve gameplay as well, so the two have to be dealt with simultaneously. 
• Video editing. Video editing is a computationally demanding process that requires your CPU to deal with encoding and decoding, compression and uncompressing, and transferring video files in real-time. 
• Video rendering. High-quality renders can take a long time. Days, even weeks – and that too on the very strongest consumer-grade processors available today. 
• Scientific applications. Running complex simulations or working with AI and ML applications can be quite CPU-intensive, as you would expect. 

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Do CPU-heavy tasks cause high CPU usage?

CPU-heavy tasks that are able to utilize multiple cores effectively will result in a high CPU usage, as all available cores and threads will be utilized to speed up the running process and complete it in the most timely manner. 

However, there are scenarios where you can have CPU-heavy tasks running on a machine without seeing high CPU usage. 

Single-threaded workloads that use up only a single core/thread (with many games falling into this category) won’t cause high CPU usage, because your processor will have plenty of cores and threads left over to dedicate to additional workloads. 

High CPU usage isn’t a problem unless it causes your processor to heat up to the point where it begins to throttle its operating frequencies to reduce heat generation. In such a case, the first thing that needs to be looked at its the cooling solution.