IS my cpu bottle-necking my gpu??

[timjshaw]

i have a new evga 560ti i love it however ive been considering upgrading my cpu

my current cpu is a:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103249

im getting ready for diablo 3 and i hear it will be somewhat cpu intensive due to all the monsters and mechanics.


Thankyou!

 

[gary1]

I actually have that processor. It should be fine, D3 isn't that intensive. You could always overclock it since it's the black edition.

 

[Ryuten]

That cpu should be fine but a good way to tell if your cpu is bottlenecking your gpu is to monitor their usage during a game. For example if your CPU usage is at 100% and your gpu usage is something like 60%, it's a pretty good indicator that it's being bottlenecked and you should upgrade. But if your cpu usage isn't maxed when gaming then it should be fine.

 

[HEXiT]

its unlikely unless its not particularly demanding on the gfx and is only using 1 thread.
your cpu is pretty much a good match for any core 2 quad so will have enough bandwidth to cope with a 560ti i think you would have to go to a 580 to bottleneck that cpu...

 

[bwrlane]

That cpu should be fine but a good way to tell if your cpu is bottlenecking your gpu is to monitor their usage during a game. For example if your CPU usage is at 100% and your gpu usage is something like 60%, it's a pretty good indicator that it's being bottlenecked and you should upgrade. But if your cpu usage isn't maxed when gaming then it should be fine.

That's a good approach but mind that you have to monitor core by core, as the overall CPU utilisation will not show up at 100% even if it's being maxed, if the game cannot use all the cores. Also, a CPU bottleneck will not usually show as 100% utilisation even on a single core, 80-90% utilisation is usually a sign there's a CPU bottleneck somewhere.

Another approach is to reduce the resolution and effects. If your frame rate does not increase (or increases by less than expected), then you are CPU bottlenecked. This is because eye candy taxes the GPU, not the CPU, so reducing them cannot alleviate the burden on the CPU.

Overall, I believe that CPU bottlenecking in games is mostly a myth if you have a modern CPU. Yes, it will have some impact, but far less pronounced than the GPU. True, you can find benchmarks that show this CPU is better than that one in games in certain scenarios. But in order to expose the nature of the CPU limitation, the benchmarks have to remove the GPU bottleneck. In order to do this, they must run at stupidly low resolutions/low settings that are nowhere near what you would use in practice.

The 560 Ti is a very good GPU but it is not that high-end. This AMD CPU can max it out easily.