Question Is my CPU bottlenecking my PC's performance?

[rgerhard]

I play Fortnite, and I really want a consistent 240 frames. I just upgraded my GPU to a model that people online said would deliver 240, however, I can't seem to get 160 consistently even with a ton of tweaks. Here are my specs:

Motherboard: MSI B450 Tomahawk AM4 ATX

GPU: Radeon VII

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Six-Core

RAM: TEAM T-Force DARK 16GM (2x8GB) (it's DDR4)

Power: Corsair CX650M (a little low on wattage for this build but still sufficient)

HDD: Seagare Barracuda 2TB

Any thoughts? I have game settings on all low and when I play CPU usage is at about 60% and GPU is at about 50%, so there's no clear sign to me that anything's bottlenecking anything else. Also often I see disk spiked to 100% in the performance monitor when I play.

Thanks in advance.

 

[rgerhard]

That's better. Now it's running at 2800mhz (instead of 2400mhz).
Still - not quite 3000mhz.

Hmmm... should I add two more sticks of RAM— or do you think I need a CPU upgrade to get 240 FPS?

 

[Flayed]

That's alot of GPU for 1080p must be lots of idle vram

 

[rgerhard]

That's alot of GPU for 1080p must be lots of idle vram

I got a big upgrade in the GPU department because I have my GPU encoding everything on OBS and I stream :/ But now the CPU isn’t providing enough frames. I’m confused as to why the CPU is at 60% usage though if it’s the bottleneck.

 

[TerryLaze]

So if lowering detail levels doesn't drastically change fps, then you are cpu limited and the gpu is plenty strong enough to deliver. Some ppl incorrectly refer to that as a cpu bottleneck, it isn't at all, the cpu can only deliver so many frames in 1 second, and you have a gpu capable of more. For that particular game.

It's very correct,it's basically 100% the definition of bottleneck.
The bottleneck has lowest throughput of all parts of the transaction path.
If that's the CPU then the CPU is the bottleneck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottleneck_(software)
"In software engineering, a bottleneck occurs when the capacity of an application or a computer system is limited by a single component, like the neck of a bottle slowing down the overall water flow. The bottleneck has lowest throughput of all parts of the transaction path. "

I got a big upgrade in the GPU department because I have my GPU encoding everything on OBS and I stream :/ But now the CPU isn’t providing enough frames. I’m confused as to why the CPU is at 60% usage though if it’s the bottleneck.

Windows task manager as well as MSI and many other tools only show you an AVERAGE usage over some amount of time.
You need a special tool that will show you REAL TIME usage of each thread of a game your CPU is running.
You can see here while windows says it's using 56% of both cores in reality it uses 100% of one core and the rest on the other core but the average comes out to be 56% .
If you have a CPU with 16 logical cores (8c/16t) then a single thread can only go up to 100/16=6.25% usage so if you get around 6% usage on at least one thread you know that your CPU is hitting its limit.

 

[jay32267]

Is this something I'd need to download, can't seem to find it on my PC. Although if it's MSI I'd think it would come with the driver install...

Yeah...you download it. I think it's a pretty cool program. It puts things in a nice graph format versus time.

 

[rgerhard]

Here's the thing, I have 6 cores (12 lt) and this is what they look like while I play...

https://imgur.com/a/VSlF65T

View: https://imgur.com/a/VSlF65T


So if none of them are maxed what's holding it back???

 

[rgerhard]

Still would love help on this if anyone's on this thread

 

[SkyNetRising]

Do you want to try manually tuning ram to 3000mhz ?
This will require switching BIOS into advanced mode and manually tune ram parameters.

 

[rgerhard]

Do you want to try manually tuning ram to 3000mhz ?
This will require switching BIOS into advanced mode and manually tune ram parameters.

Will I have to tune voltage myself, because I rather stay away from that :/

 

[SkyNetRising]

You can see required ram parameters in your CPU-Z spd screenshot (XMP-2998 column).
Ram voltage has to be set to 1.35V.

 

[rgerhard]

You can see required ram parameters in your CPU-Z spd screenshot (XMP-2998 column).
Ram voltage has to be set to 1.35V.

I would like to do this, additionally I would like to overclock my Ryzen 5 2600 to 4 or 4.1Ghz, do you know how to do this?