How To Tell If My CPU Is a Bottleneck?

[HectiKCookiE]

So I brought another r9 290x reference cooler (full specs in sig) and I'm not getting the performance boost I hoped for at all, less than 20% increase in fps in all games! And some games actually run worse. My cpu is a non overclocked FX 8320. What do you guys think?

[Comessy]

Yes your CPU is definitely bottlenecking it

[Unlikelyjoker]

100% chance of a bottleneck if what you said is happening.

[Suika]

You can tell it's a CPU bottleneck by the fact that this thread exists every week, and the only similarity between them all is an FX series processor.

You have a massive CPU bottleneck.

[ApolloX75]

So I brought another r9 290x reference cooler (full specs in sig) and I'm not getting the performance boost I hoped for at all, less than 20% increase in fps in all games! And some games actually run worse. My cpu is a non overclocked FX 8320. What do you guys think?

Run HWMonitor, HWinfo64 or MSI Afterburner. Monitor your GPU Load % vs your CPU Load %. If your CPU is sitting pinned at 100% and your GPU is below 95-99% then you're bottlenecked.

[Kherm]

yes, CPU bottleneck

[Kyuubixchidori]

depends on the game

 

Open up task manager, if any of your cores are pinned at 100%, its a bottleneck. Thats how you tell. Yes, it most likely is, but it depends on usage, in some cases the GPUs will be the bottleneck. but you have what, 600$ of gpus to a 120$ cpu? 

[connorpiper]

CPU bottlenecking it to crap. 

[connorpiper]

depends on the game

 

Open up task manager, if any of your cores are pinned at 100%, its a bottleneck. Thats how you tell. Yes, it most likely is, but it depends on usage, in some cases the GPUs will be the bottleneck. but you have what, 600$ of gpus to a 120$ cpu? 

 

100% does not mean bottleneck. 

[Godlygamer23]

One way to tell if a CPU is bottlenecking your GPU is if your GPU doesn't consistently hit full load with V-Sync off.

[Glenwing]

If you have a decent enough cooler and motherboard, put a fair overclock your CPU. If your framerate increases, it's clearly your CPU that is limiting you. But I'd hazard a guess already that this is the case.

[Aniallation]

So I brought another r9 290x reference cooler (full specs in sig) and I'm not getting the performance boost I hoped for at all, less than 20% increase in fps in all games! And some games actually run worse. My cpu is a non overclocked FX 8320. What do you guys think?

Yes there's definitely a bottleneck. Honestly if you can return that 290X and use the money to switch to Intel instead before upgrading your graphics.

[Kyuubixchidori]

100% does not mean bottleneck. 

100% on any core means its most likely the bottlneck?

[Godlygamer23]

100% on any core means its most likely the bottlneck?

Well, no not necessarily. It depends on the game.

[Hieb]

Run HWMonitor, HWinfo64 or MSI Afterburner. Monitor your GPU Load % vs your CPU Load %. If your CPU is sitting pinned at 100% and your GPU is below 95-99% then you're bottlenecked.

 

CPU doesn't need to pinned at 100% since the load changes over time. Just for a very simple example, you could be getting 60 frames per second where the CPU is at 100% the first 20 frames which take half a second (so rate of 40 fps) while the load drops for the next half of a second where 40 frames get pumped out (80 fps).

 

Simply looking at CPU usage isn't enough. Core usage is more accurate (since usually when a bottleneck occurs it's one thread getting pushed too hard, not the entire CPU), but the best thing is to monitor frame latency if possible. This will determine whether the CPU is causing frames to be delayed since it isn't fast enough to keep up.

 

Battlefield 4 has an excellent overlay graph you can draw in the corner using the PerfOverlay.DrawGraph 1 command in the console (~) and it will tell you the latency caused by the CPU and GPU in the corner. If you have no CPU bottleneck they should have the same latency almost or higher GPU latency, while if you do have a CPU bottleneck you will consistently see high CPU latency spikes.

 

I would say that for the simplest monitoring, >95% GPU usage means you don't have any significant bottleneck while under 95% GPU usage and you're probably being held back by the CPU to some degree.... but in multi-GPU setups both GPUs often don't get fully utilized

[connorpiper]

100% on any core means its most likely the bottlneck?

 

In this case yes, but if there is 100% CPU usage on any core, that does not mean an bottleneck. 

[Faceman]

So I brought another r9 290x reference cooler (full specs in sig) and I'm not getting the performance boost I hoped for at all, less than 20% increase in fps in all games! And some games actually run worse. My cpu is a non overclocked FX 8320. What do you guys think?

We told you a long time ago that your CPU is the bottleneck for a single 290, and you bought a 2nd?

[Hieb]

100% does not mean bottleneck. 

 

Yeah, depends on the game.

 

Games like Battlefield 4, 100% would mean you likely have a CPU bottleneck... whereas some games will almost always have 100% CPU on any CPU. For example on my i5-4690K in GTA V my CPU is constantly at 100% most of the time (except at some times it hangs around the 40-60% range), but this doesn't change regardless of what I have the settings set to. Via testing at 720P I found that my 4690K doesn't become a bottleneck for GTA V until around 90 FPS at higher settings. So the CPU usage in GTA V tells me absolutely nothing about how strong my CPU needs to be.

 

I'm not sure where this extra load comes from, but I've seen it in a few games. For GTA V I have a suspicion that extra CPU power goes to processing stuff like NPC and vehicle movement for the server since traffic is really bizarre moving in GTA Online. In Offline I'm guessing extra CPU power means more NPCs, traffic on screen or more variety in these things.

[HectiKCookiE]

We told you a long time ago that your CPU is the bottleneck for a single 290, and you bought a 2nd?

When was this. I don't remember that at all.

[Faceman]

When was this. I don't remember that at all.

Time and time again, more times than I can remember in the typical FX Vs. Intel threads.

[i_build_nanosuits]

So I brought another r9 290x reference cooler (full specs in sig) and I'm not getting the performance boost I hoped for at all, less than 20% increase in fps in all games! And some games actually run worse. My cpu is a non overclocked FX 8320. What do you guys think?

your CPU is no match for even one of these high end GPU's...let alone two of them!

You run 750$ worth of GPU's on a 119$ CPU what do you expect?

[Sky Daddy]

It really comes down to the game your playing and framerate your trying to reach. You'll get 60fps+ in 99% of games. (if your settings/gpu allow it)

 

Edit: I really need sleep

[Sky Daddy]

It really comes down to the game your playing and framerate your trying to reach. You'll get 60fps+ in 99% of games. (if your settings/gpu allow it)

[HectiKCookiE]

Well just so every one knows I live in Australia the land of high prices so I paid around $1000 for both my GPU and $200 for my CPU.

[HectiKCookiE]

It really comes down to the game your playing and framerate your trying to reach. You'll get 60fps+ in 99% of games. (if your settings/gpu allow it)

Edit: I really need sleep

Not running a 4K I dont