Is my GPU the bottleneck?

[Randallel]

I have a delidded i7 7700k at 4.9 GHz and a GTX 1080. I only get around 70-90 FPS on Ultra Settings for Battlefield 1 at 1440p. Is my GPU faulty, or is this as expected performance?

 

[jwcrellin]

No battlefield 1 is super hard on the cpu and it scales with physical core counts. aka a 10 core cpu would be the best performing even with lower clock speeds.

 

[Randallel]

No battlefield 1 is super hard on the cpu and it scales with physical core counts. aka a 10 core cpu would be the best performing even with lower clock speeds.

I know that BF1 uses mulit-cores, but when I went to task manager, my CPU usage was at an average of 85%. Not sure if that means anything or not.

 

[mrobscura]

yes your gpu is the bottleneck. look at its usage and it should be at or near 100% constantly while playing. thats what you want(unless you limit framrate). there is always going to be a bottleneck in a system and you want to do everything possible to make it the gpu so that it is fully utilized delivering the most performance possible. while bf1 is cpu intensive a 7700k isnt going to bottleneck a 1080. especially at 1440p. hell an i5 wouldnt at 1440p.

your fps are right in line with what a 1080 should deliver in BF1 @ 1440p.

and more cores isnt necessarily going to make bf1 run better. the 7700k outperforms the 8 core 16 thread ryzen chips.

 

[Rexper]

Really the only way to know is to test it yourself. Download a free to use program like MSI a afterburner to monitor GPU/CPU usage while gaming. If you CPU usage hovering around 100%, that's the boundary causer. Same deal goes for GPU if it's hovering around 100%. If you find your GPU is the boundary causer, and you aren't reaching your performance goal, you can turn down graphical settings to reach it. There's not much you can do if it's your CPU.

 

[Karadjgne]

For cpu, you can back off on cpu bound settings (physX, hairworks, visual distance etc).

 

[mrobscura]

again, a 7700k isnt bottlenecking anything in this situation. the gpu is the bottleneck. but as stated if op wants more fps, you are going to have to turn down settings or lower the res. the stated fps are right on par for BF1 maxed out at 1440p with a 1080.