Is this a Bottleneck?

[itzhalo]

I recently upgraded to a GTX 970 and FX 8350. I was on Far Cry 4 and noticed that my GPU is not at a constant usage and can drop to as low as 60. My framerate seems to be pretty good (Average of 70 and can get to 90 but can drop with a bit of lag to 40). I recorded a video real quick that is short but it gets the point across. http://youtu.be/23jmUZbwu70


Specs:
AMD FX 8350
Nvidia GTX 970
8gb of RAM
1 TB HDD

 

[damric]

Yes, that is the CPU choking on the game engine once in a while. Most of the time your GPU is the weakest link, but when it drops down that's CPU. 40fps is really not bad at all for minimum.

Is it noticeable when you do not have RTSS running in the corner?

 

[itzhalo]

Yes, that is the CPU choking on the game engine once in a while. Most of the time your GPU is the weakest link, but when it drops down that's CPU. 40fps is really not bad at all for minimum.

Is it noticeable when you do not have RTSS running in the corner?

Not too much. What do you think could be causing this? I thought this CPU could keep up with this GPU.

 

[itzhalo]

Yeah its definitely bottlenecking because I hopped on Battlefeild 4 and I was getting 30fps and the GPU usage was around 40-50%. I think this started to happen when I updated my graphics drivers to 344.75 so I might downgrade to the version before it and see if it still continues.

 

[damric]

Yes, that is the CPU choking on the game engine once in a while. Most of the time your GPU is the weakest link, but when it drops down that's CPU. 40fps is really not bad at all for minimum.

Is it noticeable when you do not have RTSS running in the corner?

Not too much. What do you think could be causing this? I thought this CPU could keep up with this GPU.

Bloated areas of games cause this, and some game engines just plain suck. Your CPU is good, but it's not the best. It's strong point is going to be games that can use all those cores like BF4. You could tune your RAM and overclock your CPU a bit and it would help.

 

[itzhalo]

Yes, that is the CPU choking on the game engine once in a while. Most of the time your GPU is the weakest link, but when it drops down that's CPU. 40fps is really not bad at all for minimum.

Is it noticeable when you do not have RTSS running in the corner?

Not too much. What do you think could be causing this? I thought this CPU could keep up with this GPU.

Bloated areas of games cause this, and some game engines just plain suck. Your CPU is good, but it's not the best. It's strong point is going to be games that can use all those cores like BF4. You could tune your RAM and overclock your CPU a bit and it would help.

Glad I experimented. I completely uninstalled my new drivers and everything and installed version 344.11 instead of what I had earlier which was 344.75. I ran battlefeild 4 and recorded a video. http://youtu.be/hDgPl34d7e4

It was a huge increase in performance and usage. I went from 30-25 fps and only 50-60% usage to 70-120 fps and in the 90's for usage. Definitely think this is fixed. Don't know why the new driver from nvidia gave me such a hard time. Thanks for trying to help. Apologies on not giving you too much info on this!