Does a CPU/GPU bottleneck hurt anything other than performance?

[some_4]

I know there are a lot of bottleneck questions but I couldn't find an answer to my question.

I bought a temporary budget CPU (Intel G4560) and an RX 480 8GB card. I assume it's going to bottleneck pretty badly but the rx 480 was on sale and I'm too cheap to spend a bunch of money at once. So what happens during a bottleneck, nothing gets damaged right? Can't I just use the in-game FPS cap limit to set the FPS to the highest my CPU can handle until I buy a high end one?

 

[krzyimprt]

I know there are a lot of bottleneck questions but I couldn't find an answer to my question.

I bought a temporary budget CPU (Intel G4560) and an RX 480 8GB card. I assume it's going to bottleneck pretty badly but the rx 480 was on sale and I'm too cheap to spend a bunch of money at once. So what happens during a bottleneck, nothing gets damaged right? Can't I just use the in-game FPS cap limit to set the FPS to the highest my CPU can handle until I buy a high end one?

CPU processes the game logic along with all the commands for the GPU to render the scene. Pairing a weaker CPU with a higher end GPU will cause lower FPS. No damage will be done. This depends highly on the game. Take a look at your GPU usage in game with v-sync off, if it's not 98-99 usage then it's bottlenecking. It's not as bad as everyone makes it out to be. You're on LGA1151, you can always upgrade to a quad core cpu with four physical cores.

 

[herrwizo]

No damage at all. If your GPU or CPU are the bottleneck, you simply can't get more performance out of it. That's all. In fact, there is always a bottleneck in every single system, that's the simple truth. The key is to make a nice balance when making a build, i.e. not to get a too slow CPU with too powerful GPU or vice versa. Some apps/games tend to depend more on GPU, some on CPU, some on both.

AC+ctually, I would not worry too much about your current choice of CPU. It is probably the best bang for the buck at the moment. It will likely bottleneck in BF1, but all other games should be good at the moment.