[SOLVED] Performance upgrade suggestion for the game Rust

[_HyperX_]

Hi, anyone who has familiar experiences with the game Rust please help me out. Rust never really seems to follow other typical trends in the way its performance varies dependant on the hardware. Was just curious as to which upgrade would benefit me the most inside of rust

My current specs are:
ROG Strix B450-F Gaming Motherboard
Ryzen 5 1600AF @4.15GHz
Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 16GB 3333MHz
EVGA GTX 1070 8GB

I also play at the resolution 2560x1440@144Hz, which instantly you'd think "oh upgrade your GPU then" (since the higher the resolution the more stress it puts on your GPU)
I'd think the same, however a couple people have said a CPU upgrade for rust would make the biggest difference but no one really has any solid evidence. All i really know is that when more structures are rendered in the FPS drops significantly, and ive tried doing 2 things, 1st thing decrease draw distance, it increases my FPS which I was pretty sure is CPU dependant, however im not sure hence why i came here to try seek help, the 2nd thing i tried was decreasing resolution to 1920x1080, (which i cant play at because 1920x1080 doesnt fit well on a 1440p monitor (makes it super blurry)) Which this increases FPS too. Im just not sure if one will significantly increase FPS more than the other? or if the hardware i have is already pretty well matched to the point where i need to upgrade both? Or if rust is just badly optimised which also wouldn't surprise me.

So my 2 options i was considering was either buy a Ryzen 9 3900X or an RX 5700XT, thats my sort of budget.

Anyone who reads this and knows how to help i appreciate your time and effort, thanks

 

[tennis2]

Oversimplification:
CPU determines a "rough sketch" of what is to be included in each frame.
GPU draws the frame in all its glorious detail to be sent to the monitor.

Lowering resolution makes the GPU workload easier, so if that's giving you a big performance boost, then a GPU upgrade is best for this specific situation. What in-game quality settings are you running at?
In general, higher resolutions tend to be more GPU-limited since the CPU workload of telling the GPU what's 'roughly' in a frame stays about the same regardless of resolution.

Monitoring your GPU usage (%) will tell you everything you need to know for a given scenario. If GPU usage is at/near 100%, then you're GPU-limited. If it's consistently lower than....~85%, then you're CPU-limited.

It's not as easy to monitor CPU usage (%) since not all games will fully utilize all the threads on today's core-race CPUs. So 6 threads pegged at 100% usage out of 12 threads = 50% usage in monitoring software. Of course, if your CPU usage % is constantly pegged at 100% in monitoring software, then you've obviously got a CPU limitation.
TL;DR, CPU usage is only a meaningful metric if it's reading 100%.