More of a question about what's possible in DX.
Some people have reported that when running games on higher settings they get less CPU load but when dropping the settings the CPU load increases.
What would be causing increased CPU load in these cases?
Someone suggested that the DirectX API falls back to software when certain features are turned off, but is this something that can happen - can DirectX do a mixed render where some stuff in the render pipeline is pushed through the CPU and the rest goes to the GPU?
My thoughts were texture quality and downsampling and potentially physics processing not being offloaded but does anyone actually know what the cause might be?