As someone who spent HUNDREDS of hours and nearly 50 threads on here nearly 2 years ago on the 290's release, let me shed some light here.
In certain titles, the 8350 bottles the 290 a ton, drops it down to nearly 70% GPU usage in GPU bound games (biggest problem was BF games) That's REALLY bad, you are only getting 70% of the performance you paid for!!! May as well have just bought a slower GPU.
In nearly all games you'll see 5 fps loss vs an i7, and maybe lower minimums, but in other games you can see massive drops.
In certain bottled games, I saw 10fps less on average and saw minimums 25fps lower than I get now with my Intel.
Not to mention turning down the settings didn't give me much more FPS than Ultra did, this is a VERY significant sign of a CPU bottleneck if the game is GPU bound (today, I'd say 95% or more of titles are).
Here is some actual data I RECORDED, not just word of mouth here. Absolutely Unbiased footage, unlike the very varying results I see linked everyday and like in the images above. This isn't something a benchmark can solve, since every game require different amounts of CPU resources (not to mention most benchamrks aren't that CPU intensive in the first place)
Here is some Real World bottlenecking.
Pay attention to GPU and CPU graphs as well as usage levels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcTPLMuQ610
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq9dSLOElX4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaVKMNL-aS4
In GPU bound games, if your GPU is ever lower than 99% usage with Vsync off, you ARE bottlenecking, and I saw that routinely with the 8350. I show this reading often throughout the videos, and some parts even have it live overlayed on the screen.
If you want me to explain what some of the graphs mean I can, but basically as seen in the gameplay graph in the bottom left corner, the yellow(CPU) and GPU(green) should be right on top of each other. If one is higher than the other, that part is bottling. It is holding the other back, and is a true bottleneck. In the third video I even locked the framerate so the graph more clearly and smoothly showed this correlation. Even though when locked both parts were not at full usage in this video because of vsync, their usages should still match up with each other, which the graph clearly showed they did not.
Also note that the more pixels you are pushing, the less bottlenecking you will experience. Pushing more pixels or higher resolution textures give the GPU more to do before it receives its next instructions from the CPU, effectively alleviating the bottleneck.
If you're in 1600p or 2160p you don't have as large of a problem, the GPU is being very stressed, and the slower CPU becomes less of a problem because the GPU is more preoccupied. But in 1080p? There is not enough for the GPU to render before it craves new instructions of what to render next from the CPU. If the CPU isn't keeping up, the GPU starts to idle, hence it drops GPU usage, and it's not rendering it's maximum potential amount of frames, hence the FPS performance drop. That is the science of bottlenecking.
Since I got my 4790k, I don't ever see lower than 97-99%, it fixed any low FPS issue I was having in all of my games (tested nearly 300 games) OVERNIGHT
So if I had trouble 2 years ago, I am ssuming today's games still aren't faring any better, if not worse with this combination of hardware.
If you can live with bottled performance to cut money, grab an 8320/8350, but I highly recommend an i5 over one anyday
Maybe Zen will be better???
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