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Higher Res=Lower CPU Bottleneck?

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4 hours ago, Nickathom said:

I've been seeing things around the internet saying that if you increase the resolution, the load will move to your gpu. Is this true? Ive got an old i5-3000 something, and a gtx 1070, and it bottlenecks hard. If i increase the render scale will i get a higher framerate?

 

On 2/2/2017 at 8:28 PM, Glenwing said:

It just introduces a GPU bottleneck that supercedes the CPU bottleneck. While it does "prevent" your CPU bottleneck from occurring, it's only doing so by introducing another heavier bottleneck that you encounter before you get to the point where you would encounter your CPU bottleneck.

 

You could accomplish the exact same thing without changing the resolution by downgrading your GPU to something less powerful.

 

In short, no the load does not "move" to your GPU (as in, it doesn't "move away" from your CPU). The load simply increases on the GPU side without changing on the CPU side, resolution does not affect CPU load.

 

So the load becomes more heavily weighted toward GPU power than CPU power, but it's not because the demand has been redistributed away from the CPU toward the GPU, it's because the GPU demand has increased and the CPU demand has stayed the same.

I've been seeing things around the internet saying that if you increase the resolution, the load will move to your gpu. Is this true? Ive got an old i5-3000 something, and a gtx 1070, and it bottlenecks hard. If i increase the render scale will i get a higher framerate?

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Nope.

 

The reason why typically CPU bottlenecking is less at higher resolution is because at higher resolution you get lower frame rates. If you can get high frame rates at high resolutions, your still gona get the same CPU bottlenecking.

 

CPUs don't care if it's 480P or 12k, they only care about frame rate.

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Yes because there will more work on the GPU end than in the CPU end however if your CPU is getting max out pretty heavily already increasing AA and resolution can only help you out with the bottleneck to a certain point.

 

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Just now, TechyInAZ said:

Nope.

 

Am I misunderstanding? Ive seen youtubers like linus saying it as well.

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Yes, but you have to be at higher resolutions. For example 1080p 8350 4.5Ghz 780ti BF1 100% scale im usually at 80% but with 115 it umps up to 99% use but I notice abit of lower fps

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All you're doing is moving the bottleneck to the GPU at the cost of lower FPS. You're better off just limiting you're FPS.

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Just now, wrathoftheturkey said:

Basically, the bottleneck is going to remain the same width, but the water flowing through it is going to slow down.

ah, ok, this makes sense. thanks

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2 minutes ago, Nickathom said:

Am I misunderstanding? Ive seen youtubers like linus saying it as well.

What he meant is, if your processor already can't handle 1080p due to a bottleneck on its part, rising the resolution won't help, that is something you do to balance out systems with stronger GPUs than CPUs but only to optimize frame rates, not to fix a clear unbalance issue.

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2 minutes ago, Nickathom said:

ah, ok, this makes sense. thanks

yeah.

basically, because your GPU has to work 4X as hard, the bottleneck on your CPU is still there, but there's simply a stronger bottleneck on the GPU.

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Something I've been curious about for a while, related to CPU gaming bottlenecks/performance ....

 

So let's say you are running an older E-sports game (like CS 1.6), that has its engine-imposed FPS cap removed.  You have two GTX 1080 Tis in SLI, and are running at the equivalent of CGA resolution & color depth, lowest settings, etc, to get the absolute maximum fps possible.  What currently-existing CPU would you need to not have any CPU bottleneck at all, and get the max FPS that GPU setup would be capable of driving with those settings? (idk, but maybe a 5 or 6 digit fps number I'm thinking.)

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There really isn't one.  Even an i7-7700k, the fastest gaming cpu for most games, would still be the bottle neck.  CPU can only deliver a frame to the GPU to render in a certain amount of time.  That's the maximum amount of fps you can get no matter what graphics card or graphics settings you use.

24 minutes ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Something I've been curious about for a while, related to CPU gaming bottlenecks/performance ....

 

So let's say you are running an older E-sports game (like CS 1.6), that has its engine-imposed FPS cap removed.  You have two GTX 1080 Tis in SLI, and are running at the equivalent of CGA resolution & color depth, lowest settings, etc, to get the absolute maximum fps possible.  What currently-existing CPU would you need to not have any CPU bottleneck at all, and get the max FPS that GPU setup would be capable of driving with those settings? (idk, but maybe a 5 or 6 digit fps number I'm thinking.)

 

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49 minutes ago, Cracklingice said:

There really isn't one.  Even an i7-7700k, the fastest gaming cpu for most games, would still be the bottle neck.  CPU can only deliver a frame to the GPU to render in a certain amount of time.  That's the maximum amount of fps you can get no matter what graphics card or graphics settings you use.

 

Okay I was just curious now, I wonder how much latency factors in between CPU and GPU?

For example, say you were to put a GTX 1080 Ti and an i7-7700K on the same die (if it'd fit on like an LGA2011-sized package).  Would that make any difference?

I had a situation once where I *think* having less distance for the signals/data to travel resulted in better performance, even when you'd expect otherwise - a modern AAA title on a Haswell iGPU dominating a midrange Pascal GPU.

Spoiler

The game was GTA V.  I ran two partial benchmark runs, both at absolute maximum settings, including scaling or whatever it's called cranked all the way up.  (So it was like taking my 1080p max cause that's what my monitor was, and trying to render at like 6K or 8K or whatever.)  Projected VRAM usage in the menu was somewhere north of 9 GB.  I didn't have afterburner or anything like that running during the benchmark runs, though.

Also I only ran them for a few minutes, before aborting them, as the action was several times slower than realtime.

 

The HD 4600 (on my i7-4790K, with 4x8GB DDR3-1600 CL9 RAM) got about 1.5 to 1.8 fps at the start of the sequence.

The 3GB EVGA GTX 1060 SC got 0.3 fps at the same place.

 

What I think happened, was the 1060's 3GB VRAM got totally overwhelmed, so it had to swap out with system RAM.  I'm figuring it's farther / more latency to swap from the PCI-E GPU to system RAM, as opposed to the on-die iGPU vs system RAM, hence the 1060 getting owned by the iGPU in that situation.

 

Not that it would have been playable, of course! :D I could probably handle 2-5 fps if it wasn't something like CS:GO or rapid-action competitive play. :P I've done ~6-8fps on TF Classic at lowest settings back in the day when my dad's computer's GPU was that weak. :o (That, coupled with being on dialup, meant I played as Engy most of the time.)

 

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Yes it can help but not all that much.  I'd love to see AMD release a Ryzen with full Vega and 16gb of HBM shared for the CPU and GPU in a single socket.  It'd be godlike but also the cooling solution required would be hefty.

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4 hours ago, Nickathom said:

I've been seeing things around the internet saying that if you increase the resolution, the load will move to your gpu. Is this true? Ive got an old i5-3000 something, and a gtx 1070, and it bottlenecks hard. If i increase the render scale will i get a higher framerate?

 

On 2/2/2017 at 8:28 PM, Glenwing said:

It just introduces a GPU bottleneck that supercedes the CPU bottleneck. While it does "prevent" your CPU bottleneck from occurring, it's only doing so by introducing another heavier bottleneck that you encounter before you get to the point where you would encounter your CPU bottleneck.

 

You could accomplish the exact same thing without changing the resolution by downgrading your GPU to something less powerful.

 

In short, no the load does not "move" to your GPU (as in, it doesn't "move away" from your CPU). The load simply increases on the GPU side without changing on the CPU side, resolution does not affect CPU load.

 

So the load becomes more heavily weighted toward GPU power than CPU power, but it's not because the demand has been redistributed away from the CPU toward the GPU, it's because the GPU demand has increased and the CPU demand has stayed the same.

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^This.

Your CPU is capable of a particular fps range.

Gpu can be more capable and will see less than 100% typical usage.

 

Thats why people tend to say up res or details.

You wont gain fps, but can get a prettier game at the similar fps levels using the untapped Gpu power.

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  • 4 months later...

Hi! Just wanted to chime and say raising your gpu settings higher won't fix your bottleneck BUT it will almost always help with big frame drops caused by the cpu maxxing out.I always try and keep my GPU as close to 100 as possible...you won't get many more frames but hopefully a lot less drastic frame drops.

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