Understanding my bottlenecks

[unsrm]

Hi Guys,

 

I run an old rig that holds up surprisingly well:

Core i7-920 OCd to 3.4GHZ

16GB DDR3 1333mhz RAM

Palit Geforce GTX 970

 

I'm trying to understand what the best upgrades for the system would be given the current GPU shortage and I can't figure something out: How my 970, is still my apparent system bottleneck?!

 

Figures from Afterburner @1080p

 

Cyberpunk 2077 - low settings:

CPU: 50-60% usage

GPU: 98%+

FPS: 30-35fps

 

Horizon Zero Dawn - Medium settings:

CPU: 60-75% usage

GPU: 98%+

FPS: 53fps

 

I was thinking of buying a motherboard bundle, reusing other parts (PSU, Sound Card, drives etc) but if am interpreting these figures correctly then I won't see any hardly improvement until I replace the GPU? Can an 11 year old CPU still not be the limiting factor?

 

TIA,

 

Chris

 

 

[danalog]

I'd say get a 3070 or 3080 when prices drop. That's still a decent CPU, I still use a 9 year old Xeon.

[svmlegacy]

5 minutes ago, unsrm said:

Can an 11 year old CPU still not be the limiting factor?

Yes. Especially at high resolutions and settings. The i7-920 when OC'd is still no slouch. The GTX 970 has not aged nearly as well.

[unsrm]

Wow, I really lucked out when I bought this thing for birthday in 2009!

 

It boggles my mind honestly, I can't imagine still using a P3 in 2009 and having as good an experience as I have now relatively speaking. As for 970 with its 3.5GB of meaningful ram, I agree!

[YoungBlade]

If you're comfortable gaming at 60fps, then just about any quad-core CPU from the last 15 years is probably fine. The CPU really starts working hard at high framerates, because it handles tasks on every frame. More frames = more usage, which is why Cyberpunk is pushing your CPU less than Horizon Zero Dawn. In some games, those tasks have gotten more complicated, but in a lot of games, they really haven't. So, if you were trying to play CS:GO at 200fps, then you could run into a CPU bottleneck, but you'll probably be able to get away with that CPU in 60fps gaming for the next couple of years.

 

10 minutes ago, unsrm said:

It boggles my mind honestly, I can't imagine still using a P3 in 2009 and having as good an experience as I have now relatively speaking.

I agree. It also blows my mind when I think back on how frequently hardware used to become absolutely worthless back in the early 2000s compared to today. I use a 9 year old laptop as my main laptop. That was unthinkable just a couple of decades ago.

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to PC Gaming

[QuantumSingularity]

Well the jump from Maxwell (GTX 970) to Pascal (GTX 1070) was a significant one, much greater than (in fact twice) the jump from 1070 to 2070. Everything in that 970 was good for its time. The memory may be GDDR5. but it's slow compared to now day's standards; it has much less SUs, ROPs and so on. So now when games finally started challenging the Pascal architecture, it's normal for the older GPUs to suffer. 

But here is the bad news - once you swap that GPU for a modern one, your CPU AND RAM will be the new bottleneck. This i7-920 won't be enough to push those frames. Yes, it's 4 cores 8 threads and it's only the last 3-4 years that games started utilizing even 6-cores, BUT it has low compared to the modern standards clock (most CPUs now days start at 3.6GHz and boost above 4GHz) and even worse, it has ancient IPC (Instruction Per Clock) numbers. What that means is that it's capable of working with much less instruction per cycle than the modern CPUs. It's the same reason why Ryzen 5000 obliterated Intel and their "new" 14nm+++++++++ Rocket Lake CPUs. You could boost to 6GHz if you want to, but a CPU with twice the IPC at 4GHz still will run circles around you. Then we add the really tiny L3 cache of 8MBs and last but not least - 1333MHz memory which runs at actual 667MHz... both of them simply won't be able to keep the GPU fed and you might experience even worse performance than currently. GPU bottleneck is much more preferable choice than CPU one. It provides lower, but more consistent FPS. When your CPU is the bottleneck you might get higher average number of FPS, but the frametime will be all over the board and so would be the frames themselves. 10 seconds you could be running at 130 FPS while the next 4-5 seconds have only 12 FPS. Huge freeze spikes in physics intense moments, like explosions or crashes. So if i was you, i would hold on to that 970 for a few more months till the prices normalize and now upgrade to a modern AM4 platform. Get something like Ryzen 5600X and B550 mobo with 3600MHz memory and just go for 720p until you can buy a new GPU.

[Montana One-Six]

You are most definitely going to see a pretty good improvement when getting a better CPU. In some Games I see an improvement of about 50% in FPS (especially in .1% lows) on my i9-10850K system compared to my i7-5820K system (same GPU).

 

One thing which will probably be holding back those gains a little bit is your VRAM especially in newer titles.

But with the current market situation I wouldn't buy a new GPU just yet.