Where's The Bottleneck?

[KingGreGre]

My current PC is on the following specs:
3.1 GHZ Intel Pentium G3240 Dual-Core
Intel H81M-E33
8GB DDR3 SDRAM
1TB 7200 rpm Hard Drive
AMD Radeon R7 250 2GB DDR3
Thermaltake 350W Smart PSU
Windows 8.1 OS (64-bit)

After getting tired of extremely low FPS in Assassin's Creed Unity, I decided to monitor all of my components in-game with MSI Afterburner. Here are my results:

CPU Usage on core 1 jumped from anywhere as high as 98 to as low as 82 depending on environment, but never went higher. Core 2's usage went as low as 58 to as high as 90 but never went over 90. Temperatures were normal, at around 50-60 degrees.
GPU Usage was anywhere from 92% to 99%, and temperature was around 50 degrees.

Temperatures were marked after about a half hour of gaming.

Overall FPS was 15-18 on the Title Screen, and 12-31 in-game, with even lower frames on cut-scenes.

So my question is, what is bottlenecking my performance? What is keeping this game from running better? Is it my CPU, GPU, or both? Which upgrade will boost my FPS and overall performance?

This might all sound dumb, but I'm newer to the world of PC gaming.

Thanks in advanced!
-KingGreGre

P.S. if any more game benchmarks are nessecary, I can provide more!

 

[AMDAlexK]

Its that video card. 2 GB ddr3 is really slow by todays standards. What settings are you trying to run it at? Try bumping down the settings a little, i had a r7 250x 1gb gddr5 (yes i know the memory is gddr5 not gddr3 but its the same GPU) and i remember bumping down the saettings all of the time in order to have playable FPS.

Hope this helped

 

[clonazepam]

The bottleneck might be the in-game settings you are using. You didn't mention what you have set for video... resolution, graphics detail, AA, etc. You'll likely to need to lower those if they aren't already set to the lowest settings.

 

[laviniuc]

there's no bottleneck, the system is balanced... weak but balanced. if both cores and the gpu to around 90% and stays there that's the limit of the system... try lower detail levels

 

[Paul00Doyle]

Unity is very demanding, your CPU would be your bottleneck but simply removing it will push it on to your gpu and then on to your hard drive / ram.

 

[Onus]

With both CPU and GPU hitting 90%, your system is balanced; as laviniuc points out, weak but balanced.
Your PSU limits you to a GTX750Ti, but even that would be a significant graphics card upgrade. You could also put an i3 in your motherboard for improved CPU performance.

 

[KingGreGre]

With both CPU and GPU hitting 90%, your system is balanced; as laviniuc points out, weak but balanced.
Your PSU limits you to a GTX750Ti, but even that would be a significant graphics card upgrade. You could also put an i3 in your motherboard for improved CPU performance.

Thanks for the reply! I've been thinking of upgrading for a while now, if I upgrade my PSU to a 550W, and put in an i5-4670 and a 750Ti, what kind of boost in performance do you think I could expect to see?

 

[KingGreGre]

The bottleneck might be the in-game settings you are using. You didn't mention what you have set for video... resolution, graphics detail, AA, etc. You'll likely to need to lower those if they aren't already set to the lowest settings.

Thanks for the reply. I run the game on the Medium Preset, with FXAA on 1280x720, no Vsync. If I run on the lowest settings, performance increases by about 5-7 frames, which is helpful, but the game really looks bad in return.

 

[laviniuc]

With both CPU and GPU hitting 90%, your system is balanced; as laviniuc points out, weak but balanced.
Your PSU limits you to a GTX750Ti, but even that would be a significant graphics card upgrade. You could also put an i3 in your motherboard for improved CPU performance.

Thanks for the reply! I've been thinking of upgrading for a while now, if I upgrade my PSU to a 550W, and put in an i5-4670 and a 750Ti, what kind of boost in performance do you think I could expect to see?

you need to upgrade all 3 for best results... the question is which to do first, psu, yes, defintely on the first buy list, something around 600W like you said, seasonic/antec/evga/xfx are best choices, then it's decision time, either cpu first or graphics card first. cpu at 150-200$ you're already maxed out, but it gets you the least benefit now in games. it does make the whole system a bit faster overall in usual stuff.
graphics, i would get what's on the best graphics card for the money around the 200-300usd mark.
radeon 270x, gtx 960, 280, 285 - maybe a 970 but that's already overkill without a monitor over 1080p.

 

[Onus]

If you look at the $600 SBM article, and the other low-budget SBM machines from past quarters, you'll see how little power is actually needed. For any single graphics card you're likely to buy, a 550W PSU is easily anough; even 450W is enough for a GTX960 or even a GTX970, so 450W-550W is the range you need. Current AMD cards use more power than their nVidia counterparts, so 550W is probably safest to cover all [single-card] possibilities.