Using a high end card on a lower resolution?

[Cinlow]

This is a question that has been on my mind for a minute. Say, for example:

I bought a 5090 to play games on a 1080p screen. Will I get more frames? Will there be any bottlenecks? Anything I should be aware of?

I haven't had a powerful card to test this, so I always wanted to know.

[MiszS]

That just doesn't make sense most of the time. If you can afford a 5090, then you can afford a 1440p/4K monitor, which look quite a bit better than 1080p, while still getting high FPS. Even with the 9800X3D the CPU will be the bottleneck in most games a few years old, but definitely not in new AAA games. They are mostly made with UE5, so they are pretty unoptimized, and have lots of ray tracing on top of that, so if you play 1080p native at max settings, then you won't have to worry about a CPU bottleneck

[PDifolco]

6 minutes ago, Cinlow said:

This is a question that has been on my mind for a minute. Say, for example:

I bought a 5090 to play games on a 1080p screen. Will I get more frames? Will there be any bottlenecks? Anything I should be aware of?

I haven't had a powerful card to test this, so I always wanted to know.

You'll get as much frames as the 5090 *AND* the CPU can get, usually at 1080p you'll be CPU limited and a 5090 is wasted money

[saintlouisbagels]

A 5090 outputting only 1920x1080 frames?

Well you're naturally going to get several hundred frames of output since 1080p is only 25% of 4K.

 

You will be bottlenecked by what the GPU *AND* CPU are able to achieve, you'll also be limited by your monitor.

It doesn't matter if you can get 400FPS if you're only using like a 1080 144Hz monitor.

[xg32]

i hope u have a 9800x3d, theres also some evidence in the benchmark then theres a bandwidth limit somewhere with the 5090 at 1080p, beyond traditional cpu and ram bottlenecks.

[jordanbuilds1]

Oh my Lordy lord…

 

 

did you even try to research first?

[GuiltySpark_]

Excuse the shit picture but this was supposed to be a one off to send to someone and I've used it in numerous examples now. Yeah, 1080p on a high end card is a waste of money. 

 

Fortnite in a 1080p window. Sure, lots of frames, but the poor 4090 is sitting at 56% usage and only 130W. Entirely limited by how fast the CPU can feed it. 

 

[OddOod]

1 hour ago, Cinlow said:

This is a question that has been on my mind for a minute. Say, for example:

I bought a 5090 to play games on a 1080p screen. Will I get more frames? Will there be any bottlenecks? Anything I should be aware of?

I haven't had a powerful card to test this, so I always wanted to know.

A bottleneck always exists. The ideal situation will be one where CPU and GPU are both going at 100% and just below thermal throttle limits. But that never happens in the real world. Just looking up in a game will shift the CPU/GPU usage ratio. 
If you run a top tier GPU and downgrade the resolution, you will increase frames until the limiter becomes the CPU or the game engine itself. I am not aware of any game that has truly unlimited FPS potential

[Ha-Satan]

If your goal is to play Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake II, or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle with the path tracing settings turned all the way up, then a 5090 is actually sort of justified at 1080p I guess.

 

That said, is this something a person should do? No, because playing with stuff turned all the way up doesn't actually make the game more fun in an amount that is proportional to how much money you're spending on the hardware.

[Cinlow]

Thank you, everyone, for answering my question. :3
 

1 hour ago, MiszS said:

That just doesn't make sense most of the time. If you can afford a 5090, then you can afford a 1440p/4K monitor, which look quite a bit better than 1080p, while still getting high FPS. Even with the 9800X3D the CPU will be the bottleneck in most games a few years old, but definitely not in new AAA games. They are mostly made with UE5, so they are pretty unoptimized, and have lots of ray tracing on top of that, so if you play 1080p native at max settings, then you won't have to worry about a CPU bottleneck

Fair point on the monitor. I don't plan on buying the 5090.
 

 

1 hour ago, PDifolco said:

You'll get as much frames as the 5090 *AND* the CPU can get, usually at 1080p you'll be CPU limited and a 5090 is wasted money

Good to know, thanks. :3

1 hour ago, saintlouisbagels said:

A 5090 outputting only 1920x1080 frames?

Well you're naturally going to get several hundred frames of output since 1080p is only 25% of 4K.

 

You will be bottlenecked by what the GPU *AND* CPU are able to achieve, you'll also be limited by your monitor.

It doesn't matter if you can get 400FPS if you're only using like a 1080 144Hz monitor.

Gotcha... The monitor limit with the refresh rate sounds terrible.

1 hour ago, xg32 said:

i hope u have a 9800x3d, theres also some evidence in the benchmark then theres a bandwidth limit somewhere with the 5090 at 1080p, beyond traditional cpu and ram bottlenecks.

The ideal test setup would include the 9800X3D. But yeah, as a lot of people have said. Bottlenecks sound terrible doing this.

1 hour ago, GuiltySpark_ said:

Excuse the shit picture but this was supposed to be a one off to send to someone and I've used it in numerous examples now. Yeah, 1080p on a high end card is a waste of money. 

 

Fortnite in a 1080p window. Sure, lots of frames, but the poor 4090 is sitting at 56% usage and only 130W. Entirely limited by how fast the CPU can feed it. 

 

Interesting... If the CPU were faster, would the power usage be more, therefore more frames and use of the GPU?

9 minutes ago, Ha-Satan said:

If your goal is to play Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake II, or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle with the path tracing settings turned all the way up, then a 5090 is actually sort of justified at 1080p I guess.

 

That said, is this something a person should do? No, because playing with stuff turned all the way up doesn't actually make the game more fun in an amount that is proportional to how much money you're spending on the hardware.

Good point, my friend. :3

[PDifolco]

1 minute ago, Cinlow said:

Gotcha... The monitor limit with the refresh rate sounds terrible.

 

That's not entirely true, a game running at 400FPS on a 144Hz monitor will feel (a bit) smoother and have less latency than if it ran at 144FPS

[emosun]

it depends on the task

You didn't list a task....  so technically the answer is yes , a faster card would equal more frames at lower resolutions.

If the task requires any other part of the machine to be in operation in a significant way then the answer changes.

[Cinlow]

16 minutes ago, emosun said:

it depends on the task

You didn't list a task....  so technically the answer is yes , a faster card would equal more frames at lower resolutions.

If the task requires any other part of the machine to be in operation in a significant way then the answer changes.

I was mainly thinking eSport titles becuase those games need frames for lower latency.

[GuiltySpark_]

57 minutes ago, Cinlow said:

Interesting... If the CPU were faster, would the power usage be more, therefore more frames and use of the GPU?

Theoretically, yes. 

[starsmine]

1 hour ago, Ha-Satan said:

If your goal is to play Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake II, or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle with the path tracing settings turned all the way up, then a 5090 is actually sort of justified at 1080p I guess.

 

That said, is this something a person should do? No, because playing with stuff turned all the way up doesn't actually make the game more fun in an amount that is proportional to how much money you're spending on the hardware.

Also older games that require less CPU(but are also multi threaded, so a window of mid 2010s) also benifit from bigger GPUs in general. 
 

And then you can always crank GPU load, even at a 1080p monitor resolution with SSAA and DLSS SR

Saying this is something a person should do is always weird to me. 

There is always a bottleneck, a CPU bottleneck is not actually worse then a GPU bottleneck. Even if you are leaving some GPU on the table and its running at 30%, its still giving you all the frames it can for that particular game, and then when you change to a different game it could be running at say 70%. 

6 minutes ago, Cinlow said:

I was mainly thinking eSport titles becuase those games need frames for lower latency.

ehhh, to a point. 

A gpu is not a resolution class.

[emosun]

13 minutes ago, Cinlow said:

I was mainly thinking eSport titles becuase those games need frames for lower latency.

well then a lot of other factors are at play then

From a generalized standpoint in terms of hardware , a faster gpu is faster , regardless of the rest of the hardware. And if the task is gpu bound then a faster gpu will be better.

But if it's online video games , then yeah a lot of other hardware now will dictate the frame rate the gpu can reach like the cpu or ram or drives or network or server speeds etc or whatever the program decides in the moment. If the gpu has to wait for any other component in that long chain to catch up then the gpu speed stops mattering.

When it comes to esport titles generally skill is what actually matters vs the hardware that you use. Regardless of youtubers that are paid to sell you computer hardware say.

There's the oh so classic "i need all the help i can get" excuse a lot of people use to justify buying overpriced hardware to advance in online games but it basically amounts to trying to buy your way to the top like someone buying a race car but not being good enough at driving.

[GuiltySpark_]

1 hour ago, Ha-Satan said:

If your goal is to play Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake II, or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle with the path tracing settings turned all the way up, then a 5090 is actually sort of justified at 1080p I guess.

I'd argue its still not justified at such a low resolution. That's a lot of money to only experience the title on a tiny 1920x1080 non-OLED that can't do HDR to save its life. I don't care what the in game graphics are set to. 

 

You can spend $5000 on the PC but if you hook it up to a $250 1080p monitor you're getting a $250 experience. 

 

That being said, that game cranked to 11 on a proper high resolution OLED in HDR is a sight that many people simply have to see to believe. Its PC gaming 2.0 compared to what most people are used to.

[hollyh88]

11 hours ago, Cinlow said:

This is a question that has been on my mind for a minute. Say, for example:

I bought a 5090 to play games on a 1080p screen. Will I get more frames? Will there be any bottlenecks? Anything I should be aware of?

I haven't had a powerful card to test this, so I always wanted to know.

i see no reason why people shouldnt do it if they want to max out their displays refreshrate. 
However, a 5090 is way overboard, My partner got a 9070, and She has been running it at 1080p on her 144hz display, and it maxes it out pretty much all of the time. You could go higher, but why waste the money, but if you do want to waste it, buy a 9070xt or 5070ti or 7900xtx if you can find a good second hand one.

[Mihle]

My personal opinion about monitors is that if you have anything more powerful than a 3060, you should not have 1080p monitor anymore.