Bottleneck

[DSketti]

I'm currently running a Ryzen 5 2600 and along with a 3080 ti, id like to know how bad the bottleneck is, if it will have any long term affects on the card, and what a proper CPU replacement would be to properly utilize My GPU

[YoungBlade]

What games are you playing and settings are you playing at, and at what resolution?

 

If you're playing single player games at 4K Ultra, the 3080 Ti is almost certainly still the bottleneck. A 2600 is a fine pairing in that case.

 

If you're playing eSports games at 1080p competitive settings, with a high refresh rate (240Hz+) montior, and you just want max FPS at all costs, you should just go straight to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D to justify getting the 3080 Ti.

 

As for "long term affects on the card," it won't hurt it just to be under utilized. If anything, the card's longevity would be improved, as it won't be pushing as much power and generating as much heat.

[.wncry]

The bottleneck entirely depends on what you are using the system for.

What games do you play on your pc?

[DSketti]

The games I play aren't too intensive generally, but I do very much prioritize fps over fidelity, although i think anything over 200 is a tad overkill. I play mainly Terraria, Minecraft modded, Halo infinite, No mans sky, Apex Legends, and the occasional Warzone recently, Id also like to get Elden Ring. I play on a 1080p,144 hz monitor and decided to get a 3080 ti in case of futureproofing. I just feel like My system Isn't performing as well as I imagined.

[.wncry]

I know a few of those games are heavily affected by single core CPU performance. I also have a r5 2600, and it is my main bottleneck on my system when playing games like Minecraft, even though I have a GTX 970.

 

For you, similar to @YoungBlade, I would recommend the r7 3800x (I think the X3D may be overkill).

If this is not something you can afford, then the r5 5600x would be my second choice.

[YoungBlade]

22 minutes ago, .wncry said:

I know a few of those games are heavily affected by single core CPU performance. I also have a r5 2600, and it is my main bottleneck on my system when playing games like Minecraft, even though I have a GTX 970.

 

For you, similar to @YoungBlade, I would recommend the r7 3800x (I think the X3D may be overkill).

If this is not something you can afford, then the r5 5600x would be my second choice.

Have you tried using OptiFine or Fabric to improve performance in Minecraft? Because even with my 5900X, I was getting savage frame drops in the latest versions of Minecraft, whereas versions before about 1.15 ran fine on my old i5 4440 system - I was easily able to get a locked 60fps at 12 chuncks back in the 1.12 days. For recent versions, I went with OptiFine since I mainly do single-player, and I now get a locked 120fps at 32 render distance with my 5900X.

 

The reason I'd recommend the X3D is that, given the $1200+ spent on the GPU, if you really value framerates over anything else, there's no reason not to spend another $450 on the CPU. Anything less is kinda silly.

 

Imagine the reverse: having a 5950X or 12900K, but pairing it with a GTX 1650 or RX 6400 because you're only willing to spend 1/4th as much on the other core component. The level of unbalance there isn't sensible. But I suppose a 5700X could make sense at $300, even if that still feels a bit odd to me.

 

30 minutes ago, DSketti said:

The games I play aren't too intensive generally, but I do very much prioritize fps over fidelity, although i think anything over 200 is a tad overkill. I play mainly Terraria, Minecraft modded, Halo infinite, No mans sky, Apex Legends, and the occasional Warzone recently, Id also like to get Elden Ring. I play on a 1080p,144 hz monitor and decided to get a 3080 ti in case of futureproofing. I just feel like My system Isn't performing as well as I imagined.

Both the monitor and the CPU are going to be holding you back. The 30 series doesn't scale well at lower resolutions, so you won't be able to get the most out of the 3080 Ti. The hardest games to run there CPU-wise are Warzone and (funnily enough) Minecraft, although Minecraft mainly benefits from single-core performance. An upgrade to 5000 series would help, and for those games I think a 5700X should be sufficient. It's basically the same as the 5800X in terms of performance, especially because you can just use PBO to give it the same power limits. If you want value, the 5700X is the way to go. But, if you want max performance, the 5800X3D is the best of the best on the AM4 platform. Here's a 41 game benchmark comparison between the 5800X and 5800X3D for you to see the difference. Just imagine that the 5800X is the 5700X.

 

For a monitor upgrade, I'll point you to Hardware Unboxed again. They're basically the gold standard for monitor reviews and they just did a Best Gaming Monitors round-up a couple weeks ago:

 

In the meantime, you could consider using DL DSR to improve image quality - it's a form of super sampling that you can find in the Nvidia Control Panel that uses the Tensor cores for DLSS effectively in reverse. It runs the game at a higher resolution than your monitor and then downscales it for your display, so you are actually getting better-than-native image quality. If you do have a ton of GPU headroom left over at max settings, this could be a way to go even further beyond max settings.

[.wncry]

5 hours ago, YoungBlade said:

Have you tried using OptiFine or Fabric to improve performance in Minecraft?

Yep, I cant remember a time I have played without optifine. Back in November when I did a full switch to Linux (from win10), I was seeing 20-30 more fps with shaders which was pretty sick. I believe this was the case due to the CPU overhead of <1% on Linux (specifically Gentoo), whereas it was much higher on win10.