[SOLVED] RTX 3070 Bottleneck Question

[Danigar]

Hello guys,
I've seen around some of the bottlenecking discussions and I have a general understanding that it's rather tricky concept but I still wanted to ask some opinions about my upgrade situation. I have an aging mid-range pc with:

GPU: MSI Radeon RX 480
Processor: i5-6500
RAM:16GB

I was planning to upgrade the GPU to be able to play newer games such as Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p or even 4k and I was looking to get one of the newer RTX 3070 or 3060. Since I cannot upgrade both the GPU and CPU at the moment, how much of a bottleneck or performance issue would I have if I get say the RTX 3070 with this system for a while?

 

[hotaru.hino]

Look up the performance that your CPU gets in games first. If you can't do that, then you'll have to benchmark it yourself with all the graphics settings turned down. That'll tell you the performance you can expect to get at best.

 

[jay32267]

I think your CPU would go well with something like a GTX 1060 (or around there).

The 3070 is around 60% faster than the 1060....so I think the CPU will hold it back in certain cases.

Although if it's only temporary...it's not going to hurt anything.

 

[RTX 2080]

Hello guys,
I've seen around some of the bottlenecking discussions and I have a general understanding that it's rather tricky concept but I still wanted to ask some opinions about my upgrade situation. I have an aging mid-range pc with:

GPU: MSI Radeon RX 480
Processor: i5-6500
RAM:16GB

I was planning to upgrade the GPU to be able to play newer games such as Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p or even 4k and I was looking to get one of the newer RTX 3070 or 3060. Since I cannot upgrade both the GPU and CPU at the moment, how much of a bottleneck or performance issue would I have if I get say the RTX 3070 with this system for a while?

Ok this is very important that I make this whole CPU/GPU bottleneck thing clear to you. I'll start with a basic explanation of how the rendering pipeline works:

When you play a game, your CPU requests data from your hard drive/RAM and renders certain parts of a frame. It then sends the pre-rendered frame to the GPU so that the GPU can do the portion of the frame rendering that it is responsible for which is then displayed on your screen. Thus, if your CPU isn't fast enough, certain types of games will overwhelm your CPU, causing your GPU to be underutilized because it can't begin rendering a frame until it receives it from the CPU.

In your case, your processor is a 5 year old 4 core/4 thread CPU. In most modern AAA games, 4 cores/4 threads isn't nearly enough and the clock speeds and IPC are too low as well. The problem is, Cyberpunk 2077 isn't just any modern AAA game, it is an incredibly GPU and CPU intensive game designed to push modern hardware to the limit. It has far draw distances, high NPC counts, and large numbers of in-game objects resulting in a heavy load on the CPU. Ray-tracing (if you had an interest in it) also increases the load on the CPU.

To clarify further about bottlenecking, lets talk about resolution for a moment. There is a common misconception that CPU bottlenecking only happens at 1080p. This idea has been widely propagated because this is where it is most likely to happen, but that is only because 1080p has higher frame rates than resolutions like 1440p and 4k do; running at 1440p/60 fps is just as hard on your CPU as 1080p/60 fps is. Your CPU doesn't care about resolution, that's your GPU's job, it cares about frame rates. The higher your frame rates, the harder your CPU has to work, increasing your chance of a CPU bottleneck.

So what does all this mean? It means that to play Cyberpunk 2077 the way you are hoping, you unfortunately need both a CPU and GPU upgrade. I'm sorry, there's no way around it. If you upgrade only your GPU, you're going to have stutter, lag, and low frame rates regardless of your resolution or graphical settings because your GPU is not receiving frames fast enough from your CPU. If you upgrade your motherboard and CPU but not your GPU, you'll be lucky to be able to play at 1080p 30 fps with most settings on low due to a profound lack of GPU power. While not a direct comparison, to better put your PC in context of Cyberpunk 2077, keep in mind that the Xbox One X has at least as good if not better CPU and GPU performance than your current PC and that Cyberpunk 2077 runs like absolute garbage on that console (which is the most powerful of the four 4th-gen consoles).

So you can upgrade your GPU first and upgrade your motherboard/CPU later if you want to be able to increase resolution/graphical settings in some games, but in a game like Cyberpunk 2077, you'll need a better CPU to be able to run the game very well at all.

 

[Sohom]

If u r specifically looking for cyberpunk 2077, get the 3060ti it will go well with ur cpu; i have a 1060 and the game gets bottlenecked by the gpu, as my cpu keeps around 63%, so the game is gpu intensive right now, dont know what will happen after future fixes...