[SOLVED] A possible bottleneck?

[MortFel]

Hello all. This is my first time posting on this forum, and hopefully not my last time. Would love to become a part of this community and get to know everyone. Sorry if this introduction is informal or if I'm asking questions right away.

But I have an issue at hand that has been really bothering me.

I have an I5 3470, GTX 970 and 8GB of ram, and I am facing what I think is a bottleneck.

Currently i've been playing Jedi Fallen Order, AC Odyssey along with other games, and my CPU usage is always 80-90%, higher than my GPU which remains at 50-60. This causes my frame rate to fluctuate pretty badly. This is happening in all games i've been playing.
Even Assassins Creed 2, which is a very old game. Do bottlenecks effect literally every game no matter how old they are?
If it is a bottleneck, what should I upgrade and replace to remove it?

All help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[jay32267]

When I first looked at your CPU and GPU I thought it was maybe "borderline bottleneck".....and being your usages are what they are....I'm thinking you CPU might be holding back your GPU....so I'd be looking at a different CPU. I'd also be considering upping the RAM to 16 GB. What motherboard are you running?

 

[richiestang_78]

What sort of settings are you using? Try and increase settings in order to push more load onto the GPU. Generally CPU usage increases with higher framerate and GPU increases with settings and resolution.

I would also monitor your RAM usage. 16GB is starting to become the bare minimum in most games with RAM usage easily exceeding 8 these days.

 

[cdrkf]

Hello all. This is my first time posting on this forum, and hopefully not my last time. Would love to become a part of this community and get to know everyone. Sorry if this introduction is informal or if I'm asking questions right away.

But I have an issue at hand that has been really bothering me.

I have an I5 3470, GTX 970 and 8GB of ram, and I am facing what I think is a bottleneck.

Currently i've been playing Jedi Fallen Order, AC Odyssey along with other games, and my CPU usage is always 80-90%, higher than my GPU which remains at 50-60. This causes my frame rate to fluctuate pretty badly. This is happening in all games i've been playing.
Even Assassins Creed 2, which is a very old game. Do bottlenecks effect literally every game no matter how old they are?
If it is a bottleneck, what should I upgrade and replace to remove it?

All help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi....

yes that is a cpu bottleneck- and different games will be effected differently. The issue is that 4 cores / threads isn't really enough for modern games.

The cheapest option would be to upgrade to an i7 that is compatible with your board (e.g. 3770) as 4 cores / 8 threads performs much better. The alternative is a full platform upgrade (i.e. cpu, motherboard and ram) and go for something like a Ryzen 5 2600, B450 motherboard and 16gb of DDR4 ram.

 

[TerryLaze]

CPU usage is always 80-90%, higher than my GPU which remains at 50-60. This causes my frame rate to fluctuate pretty badly. This is happening in all games i've been playing.

This would be happening no matter what combination you have, some scenes are easier than others meaning that some scenes will have more FPS than others.
That's also one of the reasons that devs lock FPS to 60 or even 30 sometimes so that the difference in FPS isn't that glaring.

If you don't want a FPS lock you can easily increase the usage on the GPU by increasing resolution or quality which should decrease the fluctuation.

 

[MortFel]

When I first looked at your CPU and GPU I thought it was maybe "borderline bottleneck".....and being your usages are what they are....I'm thinking you CPU might be holding back your GPU....so I'd be looking at a different CPU. I'd also be considering upping the RAM to 16 GB. What motherboard are you running?

Intel Corporation DQ77CP

 

[MortFel]

What sort of settings are you using? Try and increase settings in order to push more load onto the GPU. Generally CPU usage increases with higher framerate and GPU increases with settings and resolution.

I would also monitor your RAM usage. 16GB is starting to become the bare minimum in most games with RAM usage easily exceeding 8 these days.

So I did that, my GPU usage did increase to the 70s, but my CPU usage still remained considerably higher, hardly fluctuating below 100.

I'll also monitor my ram usage and give an update asap.

 

[MortFel]

Hi....

yes that is a cpu bottleneck- and different games will be effected differently. The issue is that 4 cores / threads isn't really enough for modern games.

The cheapest option would be to upgrade to an i7 that is compatible with your board (e.g. 3770) as 4 cores / 8 threads performs much better. The alternative is a full platform upgrade (i.e. cpu, motherboard and ram) and go for something like a Ryzen 5 2600, B450 motherboard and 16gb of DDR4 ram.

Changing my CPU would probably be the most feasible option for me at the moment. Would it make a considerable difference though with the 3770 also being a 3rd gen processor?

 

[jay32267]

Intel Corporation DQ77CP

Well about the fastest you can go with that would be an i7-3770 or i7-3770K.
That would get you about 40% more speed and I would think would get rid of any lag you have from your i5.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-3470+@+3.20GHz&id=822

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3770+@+3.40GHz

I'm seeing them for around $70 on EBay used.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_fr...%2D3770&_dcat=164&rt=nc&LH_ItemCondition=3000

 

[MortFel]

40% is a good jump. Thank you for the links.

 

[jay32267]

40% is a good jump. Thank you for the links.

You're welcome.