Question Intel Core i5 3470 + GTX 1050 ti = bottleneck?

[HCM]

Back in February of this year I upgraded from a GT 730 2GB VRAM to a GTX 1050 ti, which worked fine mostly. Why "mostly"? So far there were 3 games that I had problems with: Rainbow Six Siege, HITMAN 2016 and Resident Evil 7. While the games themselves ran at more FPS than the old GT 730, which is expected, they did have one BIG problem: framedrops and freezes took place the whole time. After trying out some settings, I did find some kind of fixes to it: putting a frame cap and, biggest of both, using RENDER SCALING (or SUPER SAMPLING). While those did get rid of the problems mostly, I still encounter them from time to time and, in RE7 and Hitman it makes the game unbareable to play. To be more specific, 100% CPU usage is the one causing them.
Right now I consider it to be a bottleneck type of problem, and thus only being fixed by a CPU upgrade. There is still one thing I don't understand: How come other people with the same setup manage to avoid these freezes and run the game at over 70FPS without a problem, while I can't? The difference that I did observe is the 1080p resolution, me having a 1366x768 one. I do understand that the bigger resolution would put a bigger load on the GPU, thus making the CPU-GPU difference smaller. My problem, though, appears when the FPS is bigger than 70-80, sometimes meaning SUPER SAMPLING isn't enough.
I did search for the problem online, but I couldn't find a fix.
Is my CPU bottlenecking? Is it related to the resolution in any way? Why these 3 games out of all I tried?
Quick note: It got worse and worse as time passed.

Sorry for the long thread and thank you for any reply.

 

[SamNoHam]

Try reinstalling drivers or windows?

 

[maxamillionfeettall]

How's your ram situation, do you have a single stick or two. If its only one stick and running in single channel mode, get another stick.

Use Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) to safely remove old drivers.

Could also be windows, sometimes windows or antivirus programs will have high background cpu usage, in that case, pull up task manager to see whats eating up usage in details or processes.

Could also try capping fps to 60 or so.

 

[HCM]

I tried out RE7 again and I somehow (not sure how) managed to achieve over 100FPS without any freeze/framedrop problems (and with Resolution Scaling at the default, which is 1). I just kept on playing the same level with different settings, both higher and lower, and it suddenly worked for all I tried.
I also found out that Rainbow Six Siege isn't causing problems just for me, but for plenty of people, even with better CPUs. Basically it's a bug that, if you're unlucky like me and many others, it will affect your PC. It seems that for some reasons it affects only NVIDIA+Intel computers. So far I tried verifying game files, reinstalling uPlay, playing around with settings and some others fixes that might have worked for others, but nothing really did it except frame limiting at the same number of FPS that is your refresh rate or close to it, or pumping up the graphics so that you get lower FPS. I don't have a display with over 60hz sitting around to test, but if I manage to get my hands on one I'll update the thread with the result.
I couldn't test HITMAN 2016 since I don't have it installed anymore, though I'm going to update the thread with any test results when I decide to try again with it.
I have 2 sticks of DDR3 RAM, each 4GB, and I didn't find any problem with them.
My antivirus is turned off most of the time and Windows didn't really add up more than 5-10% at CPU usage.
In conclusion, for RE7 the problem was solved, for HITMAN 2016 it is not yet known and for R6S it's a known bug that still hasn't been fixed and the only real solution I can find is moving to AMD, which I might do in the future.
I will attempt a driver reinstall in the future along with other tries and will update if I eventually find a fix. As for a Windows reinstall, I decide to keep that as a last resort fix.
Thank you again for the replies and any new idea is welcome.

 

[HCM]

I got MSI Afterburner to run a few days ago, so I got to testing some games. What I found out is that not only the ones mentioned in this post got my CPU to 100%, but others too. They just didn't show any freezes or Discord lag. This 100% USAGE moments only took place when going over a specific amount of FPS, mostly 60. I also noticed that during gameplay my CPU temps reached up to 75 degrees Celsius, which might cause the usage problem, more or less. After all, my cooler isn't really something I'd call.....good. Eventually, videos of people with the same setup that got WAY better temps and no signs of 100% CPU proved to me that the problems are most likely caused by my CPU Cooler. Therefore, instead of buying a new cooler and upgrading my CPU in the next 2 years anyway, I decided that this November I'm attempting to build my own rig from 0, only keeping the GTX 1050 Ti that I already have. I feel like this is the best option for a future proof PC for me.