[SOLVED] CPU bottlenecking my RTX 2060 ?

[simas300]

Greetings!

I've been wondering, is my old i5-4670k enough to handle my new RTX 2060 GPU?
In some games, I have been suffering some stutters, lag spikes, which makes me think I need to replace it.

However, I have come across a video of a guy who had a "non-k" variant of the same processor and paired it with a 1070 card. Somehow his performance exceeded mine quite significantly (I tried the same game he did, and my computer constantly lagged and stuttered, no to mention gave worse overall fps).

Ive also performed a benchmark that's built-in Far Cry 5 and while 1920x1080 on ultra settings I receive an average of 81 fps, but every time, with no exception, there's an instance where my frames fall down to 31 (the graph present in the game paint a dreadful picture). And that spike seems to be present in all the games I tested so far.

My full specs are as follows:

i5-4670k @ 3.4Ghz
RTX 2060
PSU Seasonic S12II-620 620W 80 Plus Bronze
H87M-E33
8GB DDR3 RAM


So my questions would be:

• 
  ■ Is my processor too weak for RTX 2060?
  ■ What could I do to get rid of these spikes?

 

[jay32267]

Is my processor too weak for RTX 2060?

Yes I think so.

An RTX 2060 actually scores higher than a GTX 1080.

....and I'm running a GTX 1080 with a cpu faster than yours (i7-980) and my CPU is holding back the 1080.....so I think your CPU is holding back the 2060.

 

[SkyNetRising]

You're probably hitting ram limit. For lot of newer games 8GB is not enough.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

It's a combination of both i suspect. Slight bottleneck in CPU demanding games, and a system ram wall for anything new (AAA games). As SkyNetRising said, games like BFV use upwards of 9gbs at 1080p 60hz. 8gbs used to be the sweet spot, but thats 16gb's now.

Your CPU is still decent, and there are many games were there won't be a bottleneck, but in anything CPU demaindg the 4c/4t CPU you have maxes out.

Both of those can cause FPS drops, frame time spikes and stuttering.

 

[Rodrigodrt]

It is enough? yes. Will it bottleneck, possibly, likely... it really doesn't matter however, every processor bottlenecks in practical terms, else you'd get infinite FPS, this worry about bottlenecking is largely unecessary in most cases. 95%

If your CPU meet the minimum requirements for whatever game you're playing its not it's fault, it's not bottleneck related issue.

 

[Karadjgne]

Normally, no that i5 is plenty strong enough for a 2060, but you are watching results on YouTube. Those pc's are set for gaming only, there's no AV to speak of, no office apps, no other stuff like Cortana activated, they are streamlined for max fps in every way plausible. This includes certain things like nvidia global settings tweaks, turning off ray-tracing etc, stuff usually not even mentioned. So take YouTube videos with a grain of salt, they only show what's possible, not probable.

It's an i5. That's 4 threads. In games that are optimized for 8 threads, like gta:V, things get prioritized, which slows everything down. Anything even close to 100% cpu usage is going to be slower, there's other processes involved not just the game.

8Gb of ram can hurt. If using over 7Gb of ram total, you'll run into pagefile access, which is bad enough on an SSD, but absolutely miserable for gaming on a hdd.

Ssd, the emptier the better. If there's too much data, not enough freespace, it's going to slow things significantly as windows needs room to swap things, read/write data etc.

Some games the 2060 is worse than a gtx1070, some it beats a gtx1080, it's pretty equitable overall to a gtx1070 ti.

 

[simas300]

Thank you for your input guys. In older games (like metro redux 2033) my CPU usage doesn't even go higher than 40% however in others (fallout 4 for example) it's the GPU that does not exceed 40% usage. Different games, different architectures I know. Yet I would like to get more performance out of my new video card since now I only get about 37-48 fps in metro, which makes me assume the long-awaited metro:exodus will have even worse performance).

I was thinking of buying a Ryzen 5 2600 (with a new mobo and 16GB of DDR4 RAM) or pairing said parts with Ryzen 5 2600x. However, I'd prefer to refrain myself from further upgrades if there was a way to somewhat combat this bottleneck and overcome these blasted lag spikes.

Any ideas?

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

It is enough? yes. Will it bottleneck, possibly, likely... it really doesn't matter however, every processor bottlenecks in practical terms, else you'd get infinite FPS, this worry about bottlenecking is largely unecessary in most cases. 95%

If your CPU meet the minimum requirements for whatever game you're playing its not it's fault, it's not bottleneck related issue.

sorry mate, didn't mean to downvote you there

 

[Karadjgne]

Install the latest bios, also get the latest motherboard chipset drivers for the motherboard. Win10CE can play crappy with older driver versions.

 

[simas300]

Normally, no that i5 is plenty strong enough for a 2060, but you are watching results on YouTube. Those pc's are set for gaming only, there's no AV to speak of, no office apps, no other stuff like Cortana activated, they are streamlined for max fps in every way plausible. This includes certain things like nvidia global settings tweaks, turning off ray-tracing etc, stuff usually not even mentioned. So take YouTube videos with a grain of salt, they only show what's possible, not probable.

It's an i5. Th

Yes, youtube videos of such manner are usually not a good example to go by. However, this particular one does not seem to be like that, and the specs are lower than that of my rig's.

Here's the actual video in question.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPuP4t_RHn0

Bear in mind that my performance in this game is around 45-50 while in town and around 60-65 fps when out on a quest.

It's just so bizarre to me that its possible to achieve better results with somewhat slower equipment.

I guess I've forgotten to mention that I am using Win7. As for the BIOS update, I've actually tried that. The computer would freeze every time I attempted to flash it through the USB, so I have up on it (the paranoia of bricking my mobo was starting to set in).

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Thank you for your input guys. In older games (like metro redux 2033) my CPU usage doesn't even go higher than 40% however in others (fallout 4 for example) it's the GPU that does not exceed 40% usage. Different games, different architectures I know. Yet I would like to get more performance out of my new video card since now I only get about 37-48 fps in metro, which makes me assume the long-awaited metro:exodus will have even worse performance).

I was thinking of buying a Ryzen 5 2600 (with a new mobo and 16GB of DDR4 RAM) or pairing said parts with Ryzen 5 2600x. However, I'd prefer to refrain myself from further upgrades if there was a way to somewhat combat this bottleneck and overcome these blasted lag spikes.

Any ideas?

OC'ing the CPU will negate 'some' of the bottleneck, but you will still have issues in CPU demanding games.

A platform upgrade, like you mentioned along with the RTX2060 will give you stellar 1080p gaming, and pretty excellent 1440p gaming.

 

[boju]

I suggest run msi Afterburner and run osd stats for cpu usage and fps. Look at frame rates vs cpu usage. Use Afterburner to limit fps to somewhere comfortable enough before cpu reaches 100%.

The cpu pre-renders every frame so need to look into it and limit fps to help cpu focus on other aspects of the game. In-game benchmarks rarely bench NPC's mid game so that's where they fail to represent real world playing.

 

[simas300]

Thank you for all your help guys, makes me wish I could select multiple answers as the "ultimate solution" in this thread!

 

[Karadjgne]

Also might look into nvidia global settings. Things like changing pre-rendered frames from 3 (default) to 1 can improve fps somewhat. When looking at YouTube videos, this is one of the things that's already done and never mentioned. Also things like shutting down any excess services that aren't necessary to the game, background stuff like ms store searches, Cortana, Xbox DVR crap etc.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Thank you for all your help guys, makes me wish I could select multiple answers as the "ultimate solution" in this thread!

No probs. If you require further info, feel free to PM me.