Iver Hicarte

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May 7, 2016
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Greetings,

I know it seems like a very dumb question, but I just had to ask to surely know and to quench my curiosity. Whenever someone is talking about bottlenecking it's always more on the gaming performance part, well that is because of the obvious fact that a lot of people game than do productivity with their systems. But I am a professional editor and I do a lot of video editing and production. So my question is, if there is bottlenecking on gaming performance, then is there also a bottleneck when it comes to productivity performance? I'm hypothesizing there is, since gaming performance also reflects the overall performance of the GPU.
 
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Yes you can bottleneck your GPU in productivity. Example: if I fold proteins on my graphics card and a 6c/12t CPU at the same time, I need to keep 2 cores/4 threads idle to just feed the GPU load otherwise I get less folding done on the GPU, which does by far more work.
A bottleneck describes exactly what you think of, it's anything that slows down how fast you can go.
When gaming the CPU can slow down the GPU from getting all the FPS, when editing the bottleneck is more often the amount and speed of ram you have available and the speed of your hard drives especially your scrap drive.
The CPU as well if you have really big projects with tons of effects previewing all at the same time.
 
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Eximo

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Depends on the task specifics.

Real time rendering is not the same as massive calculations performed on a GPU. Like encoding, deep learning/AI, etc. In those the instructions are given to the GPU and it is left to it. In gaming the CPU has to constantly be telling the GPU what to do, which is when you get CPU bound games, even if your GPU can keep up, the game engine can set limits. (There you would increase graphics settings, since you get about the same FPS either way)

As mentioned above, memory speed and capacity can play a more significant role in productivity vs the typical gamer: 16GB of 'good enough' speed. More important to AMD than Intel at the moment as well.

As an editor, you might actually face issues with storage speed and bandwidth.
 
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kanewolf

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Greetings,

I know it seems like a very dumb question, but I just had to ask to surely know and to quench my curiosity. Whenever someone is talking about bottlenecking it's always more on the gaming performance part, well that is because of the obvious fact that a lot of people game than do productivity with their systems. But I am a professional editor and I do a lot of video editing and production. So my question is, if there is bottlenecking on gaming performance, then is there also a bottleneck when it comes to productivity performance? I'm hypothesizing there is, since gaming performance also reflects the overall performance of the GPU.
First having a good definition of a bottleneck is important. It is an imbalance in a system. There will ALWAYS be a limiting component. It is just a question of degree. If you have a CPU intensive task, but have not installed enough DIMMs for your CPU to have maximum memory bandwidth, your RAM subsystem will be a bottleneck. It is not balanced with the capabilities of your CPU.
For your specific area of interest, your RAM and your storage are most likely to be limits. If you had no solid state storage, your HDD WOULD be a bottleneck to video editing. Or if you had 8GB RAM then the total memory WOULD be a bottleneck.
 
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Yes you can bottleneck your GPU in productivity. Example: if I fold proteins on my graphics card and a 6c/12t CPU at the same time, I need to keep 2 cores/4 threads idle to just feed the GPU load otherwise I get less folding done on the GPU, which does by far more work.
 
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