Again reviving this old thread, but I have ridden this horrible rollercoaster before
Simple answer, yes, it will bottleneck in certain titles. Depends on what you play.
It IS safe to assume the newer games are getting, the more CPU demand you need. Even with Mantle on many games, my bottleneck was never fully alleviated with my 8350 and R9 290
As someone who spent HUNDREDS of hours and nearly 50 threads on here nearly 2 years ago on the 290's release, let me shed some light here.
In certain titles, the 8350 bottles the 290 a ton, drops it down to nearly 70% GPU usage in GPU bound games (biggest problem was BF games)
In nearly all games you'll see 5 fps loss vs an i7, and maybe lower minimums, but in other games you can see massive drops.
In certain bottled games, I saw 10fps less on average and saw minimums 25fps lower than I get now with my Intel.
Not to mention turning down the settings didn't give me much more FPS than Ultra did, this is a VERY significant sign of a CPU bottleneck if the game is CPU bound (today, I'd say 95% or more of titles are).
Here is some actual data I recorded, not just word of mouth here.
Pay attention to GPU and CPU graphs as well as usage levels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcTPLMuQ610
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq9dSLOElX4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaVKMNL-aS4
In GPU bound games, if your GPU is ever lower than 99% usage with Vsync off, you ARE bottlenecking, and I saw that routinely with the 8350. I show this reading often throughout the videos, and some parts even have it live overlayed on the screen.
If you want me to explain what some of the graphs mean I can, but basically as seen in the gameplay graph in the bottom left corner, the yellow(CPU) and GPU(green) should be right on top of each other. If one is higher than the other, that part is bottling.
Since I got my 4790k, I don't ever see lower than 97-99%, it fixed any low FPS issue I was having in all of my games (tested nearly 300 games) OVERNIGHT
So if I had trouble 2 years ago, I am ssuming today's games still aren't faring any better, if not worse with this combination of hardware.
If you can live with bottled performance to cut money, grab an 8320/8350, but I highly recommend an i5 over one anyday
Maybe Zen will be better???