Interpreting Afterburner

[Harthal]

Hello all, i'm posting this with the goal of understanding some MSI Afterburner monitoring results, i'm trying to learn how to interpret the results i see for future reference.

My setup atm is:

EVGA GTX 1070

i5 8600

16GB DDR4 2133Mhz

860 EVO 256GB

B360 Gaming Plus Mobo

 

I was testing Far Cry 4 and most of the time i was seeing GPU usage at 100% and CPU usage at around 40-55% however that would usually happen when i'd hit 144Hz with V-sync on in a 1080p 144hz display.
The rest of the time that i wouldn't hit that high FPS i'd be with CPU and GPU usage like this the image attached.

So FPS was not being limited by the an FPS lock, neither GPU or CPU was at max usage. How should i interpret this? 
By monitoring for a long period of time i could understand that i had a GPU bottleneck however in certain instances i'd read results like this, what is keeping FPS from being higher when neither the GPU or CPU is at max usage?

 

I apologize if i'm not expressing it well, cheers.

[FloRolf]

It shouldn't happen with your config but maybe it's still a CPU bottleneck. 

You see, it's not really the overall CPU utilization that could be holding you back, it's also the per core utilization. So maybe 1 core is pegged at 100% and therefore limiting your GPU. 

You can also show per core stats in afterburner. 

[Harthal]

11 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

It shouldn't happen with your config but maybe it's still a CPU bottleneck. 

You see, it's not really the overall CPU utilization that could be holding you back, it's also the per core utilization. So maybe 1 core is pegged at 100% and therefore limiting your GPU. 

I see, i'll test it out. And if it turns out to be the case it's due to certain games not utilizing more than a certain amount of cores?

[Harthal]

1 hour ago, FloRolf said:

You can also show per core stats in afterburner. 

V-sync off, no core seems to be at 100%, could it still be a cpu bottleneck or gpu?