Iver Hicarte

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May 7, 2016
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Greetings!

Is there a serious bottleneck when you pair an RX 480 with a 5000 series Ryzen? I know for sure there will be a bottleneck, but how big will it be? And how much performance am I gonna be losing? I am going to be buying the 5900x, I really can't afford to buy a GPU right now given the current state of the market. I'm more of an editor anyway than a gamer, so I think I can afford to be stuck with my good ol' RX 480 which has been serving me well for 4 years. And, editing is more of a CPU intensive task anyway so I can afford not to upgrade the GPU. But...is there a serious performance loss when I pair my RX 480 with a 5900x, will the CPU underperform? In my case, the CPU upgrade is more practical than the GPU but what are your thoughts guys?

Thank you.
 
Solution
Hey there,

Don't get hung up on the term 'bottleneck'. It's a bit of a misnomer.

To answer your question: how much performance are you going to lose with a RX480, the answer is none! Your Ryzen 5xxx series CPU will get top performance from that GPU.

Would another stronger GPU give you more FPS? Yes, it would. It's obvious why. In your case, it's almost like a reverse bottleneck. If your RX480 serves your needs as you want, then there is no bottleneck.

You could argue about having a more balanced GPU to go with a higher end CPU.
Hey there,

Don't get hung up on the term 'bottleneck'. It's a bit of a misnomer.

To answer your question: how much performance are you going to lose with a RX480, the answer is none! Your Ryzen 5xxx series CPU will get top performance from that GPU.

Would another stronger GPU give you more FPS? Yes, it would. It's obvious why. In your case, it's almost like a reverse bottleneck. If your RX480 serves your needs as you want, then there is no bottleneck.

You could argue about having a more balanced GPU to go with a higher end CPU.
 
Solution
The RX 480 won't hold the CPU back and the system should run fine as long as memory and hard drives are up to the tasks you're running. The GPU only comes into play as a limiting factor when you have a specific application you're running that makes use of specific features the 480 lacks like cuda cores on nvidia cards.
 
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Agreed. Basically your CPU will flood the 480 with as much data as it can process. The only slowdowns you should see are based on your 480. If you don't get the FPS you want, turn down the details, AA etc and you should see an uptick in FPS.

As was stated, this situation is better than if you had a CPU bottleneck. In a CPU bottleneck, your CPU would not be able to keep up with your GPU, and you wouldn't be able to do much about it. In your case however, the GPU is your limiter. So it should hold up just fine until it's replaced, just in gaming it will hold back the FPS at times when it hits it's limits.