Bottlenecking

[Supreme-frost]

Hey guys, i was wandering if someone could give me a bit of an explanation on bottle necking or CPU/ GPU bound. My rig is gonna have an Rx 470 with the Pentium g4560. however if i was to put in say a GT X 1080 with that same CPU, i would actually get worse performance in games than with the Rx 470. why is this?? surely the stronger GPU should give me more frame rates even with my Pentium g4560. Also i hear you tubers saying the GPU is the limitation even when its not running at 100% ( MSI afterburner). Sorry if this is a silly question

[3 Lions]

This will help 

 

 

[EPPHO]

You would get better performance with 1080.

[rjfaber91]

25 minutes ago, Supreme-frost said:

Hey guys, i was wandering if someone could give me a bit of an explanation on bottle necking or CPU/ GPU bound. My rig is gonna have an Rx 470 with the Pentium g4560. however if i was to put in say a GT X 1080 with that same CPU, i would actually get worse performance in games than with the Rx 470. why is this?? surely the stronger GPU should give me more frame rates even with my Pentium g4560. Also i hear you tubers saying the GPU is the limitation even when its not running at 100% ( MSI afterburner). Sorry if this is a silly question

 

The amount of liquid that can flow out of a bottle in a set amount of time is limited by the thickness of the neck. You could make the rest of the bottle as small or large as you want to, but you'll always be limited by the neck. Similarly, a PC component that holds back other components is called a bottleneck, because it acts in the same way. Because there's no such thing as a perfectly balanced setup, there will always be a bottleneck in your system, and because different workloads stress components differently, that bottleneck isn't always the same component either.

 

When you hear people on these forums use the word, they'll most likely be talking about a CPU bottleneck under gaming loads, ie. the CPU is holding back other components (notably the GPU) from reaching their fullest performance potential. While using the word strictly in this sense can often be somewhat misleading, it is worth noting that it's very common practice, among gamers at least, to keep using the same base platform of motherboard, CPU and RAM for a longer time, and switch out graphics cards as their gaming needs rise, so getting the maximum performance out of your graphics card is certainly important in that case. However, even for gamers, CPU bottlenecks aren't the only thing worth considering; bottlenecks can also occur through having too little RAM capacity, or running a game off a particularly slow storage device.

 

The aim of most gamers is to have the GPU be the bottleneck in their system, which is to say that all other components can outperform the graphics card, and therefore upgrading the graphics card at a later stage will give tangible performance improvements. As such, using SSD boot drives and game libraries, and at least 16GB of RAM have become widely-adopted strategies, and similarly gamers care about the CPU they use for this same reason. Generally speaking any modern AMD or Intel CPU with at least four physical cores will not bottleneck a modern graphics card, even when talking about the high-end, but to keep the CPU comfortably above the point where it would bottleneck a system even with a later graphics card upgrade, an AMD Ryzen chip or an Intel Core-chip of the 6th or 7th generation would be advisable.

 

In your specific case, the thing most likely holding you back is the fact that the Intel Pentium G4560 only has two physical cores. I would argue therefore that if you were to upgrade any part of your system to improve gaming performance, it ought to be your CPU. I'm assuming that you only mentioned the GTX 1080 as an example, but on the off chance that you're actually planning on buying one; I would not do that, and instead divide your budget between a CPU upgrade and a GPU upgrade, or even just forego the GPU upgrade altogether and simply upgrade the CPU.

 

Also, it is not true that changing the RX 470 in your system to a GTX 1080 would reduce gaming performance, except perhaps in games that are much more optimised for Radeon rather than GeForce graphics. If you are bottlenecking an RX 470, you simply won't see performance go up by going to a GTX 1080, but you won't see performance go down either.

[Yoinkerman]

39 minutes ago, Supreme-frost said:

Hey guys, i was wandering if someone could give me a bit of an explanation on bottle necking or CPU/ GPU bound. My rig is gonna have an Rx 470 with the Pentium g4560. however if i was to put in say a GT X 1080 with that same CPU, i would actually get worse performance in games than with the Rx 470. why is this?? surely the stronger GPU should give me more frame rates even with my Pentium g4560. Also i hear you tubers saying the GPU is the limitation even when its not running at 100% ( MSI afterburner). Sorry if this is a silly question

You would not get worse performance.  That's not how it works.

[Supreme-frost]

26 minutes ago, rjfaber91 said:

 

The amount of liquid that can flow out of a bottle in a set amount of time is limited by the thickness of the neck. You could make the rest of the bottle as small or large as you want to, but you'll always be limited by the neck. Similarly, a PC component that holds back other components is called a bottleneck, because it acts in the same way. Because there's no such thing as a perfectly balanced setup, there will always be a bottleneck in your system, and because different workloads stress components differently, that bottleneck isn't always the same component either.

 

When you hear people on these forums use the word, they'll most likely be talking about a CPU bottleneck under gaming loads, ie. the CPU is holding back other components (notably the GPU) from reaching their fullest performance potential. While using the word strictly in this sense can often be somewhat misleading, it is worth noting that it's very common practice, among gamers at least, to keep using the same base platform of motherboard, CPU and RAM for a longer time, and switch out graphics cards as their gaming needs rise, so getting the maximum performance out of your graphics card is certainly important in that case. However, even for gamers, CPU bottlenecks aren't the only thing worth considering; bottlenecks can also occur through having too little RAM capacity, or running a game off a particularly slow storage device.

 

The aim of most gamers is to have the GPU be the bottleneck in their system, which is to say that all other components can outperform the graphics card, and therefore upgrading the graphics card at a later stage will give tangible performance improvements. As such, using SSD boot drives and game libraries, and at least 16GB of RAM have become widely-adopted strategies, and similarly gamers care about the CPU they use for this same reason. Generally speaking any modern AMD or Intel CPU with at least four physical cores will not bottleneck a modern graphics card, even when talking about the high-end, but to keep the CPU comfortably above the point where it would bottleneck a system even with a later graphics card upgrade, an AMD Ryzen chip or an Intel Core-chip of the 6th or 7th generation would be advisable.

 

In your specific case, the thing most likely holding you back is the fact that the Intel Pentium G4560 only has two physical cores. I would argue therefore that if you were to upgrade any part of your system to improve gaming performance, it ought to be your CPU. I'm assuming that you only mentioned the GTX 1080 as an example, but on the off chance that you're actually planning on buying one; I would not do that, and instead divide your budget between a CPU upgrade and a GPU upgrade, or even just forego the GPU upgrade altogether and simply upgrade the CPU.

 

Also, it is not true that changing the RX 470 in your system to a GTX 1080 would reduce gaming performance, except perhaps in games that are much more optimised for Radeon rather than GeForce graphics. If you are bottlenecking an RX 470, you simply won't see performance go up by going to a GTX 1080, but you won't see performance go down either.

Thanks a lot your post, helped me clarify a lot. My plan is to actually pick up at least a kaby lake i5 and a really powerful Nvidia GPU in the future. I just wanted to get more of an understanding on bottlenecks.

[rjfaber91]

8 minutes ago, Supreme-frost said:

Thanks a lot your post, helped me clarify a lot. My plan is to actually pick up at least a kaby lake i5 and a really powerful Nvidia GPU in the future. I just wanted to get more of an understanding on bottlenecks.

You're welcome. The setup that you're sketching is a very decently balanced one, by the way.