Confirming GPU bottleneck

[Kalm_Traveler]

Just wanted to double check, if in a given game the GPU is around 90% util but the CPU is around 25% that is a pretty clear indicator of GPU bottlenecking, right? 

 

In my case I'm looking at Witcher 3 running at 3440 x 1440 with all settings on max. FPS seems to stay around 60 to 70  CPU is i7 6900k running itself at 4ghz even though I haven't OC it yet, it just bumped up when i enabled the 2666mhz XMP setting for the RAM. GPU is a pair of EVGA GTX 1080 FTW cards in SLI and both hit 90% or so. 

 

I assumed this meant I need a pair of 1080 Ti cards so i just ordered two 1080 Ti FTW3. Hope this and a real OC on the CPU to hopefully 4.4ghz or so will bump fps up a bit. 

[Damascus]

Check the individual core usage.  You are probably running a quarter of your cores at 100%

 

Your gpu's are fine.

[ARikozuM]

Check individual core usage to be sure that they're all being utilized evenly. 

[bomerr]

FPS seems "low."

 

I have a single 1080 Ti and I hit about 90 FPS avg on regular 1440p (2560x1440) at max settings. Did you overclock the cards by at the very minimum maxing out the power slider and voltage setting? I'm running max voltage, power, +75core and +700 memory for 2050core/6200memory. I would also recommend turning down 2 settings on Witcher 3. Hairworks at only 4x instead of 8x and shadows to high instead of ultra as that will met you a huge amount of FPS for very little difference in quality. 

[Kalm_Traveler]

Haven't overclocked anything yet, all stock. 

 

What's the best way to track individual core utilization? With HWmonitor I see that all cores hit 100% at some point during a test session but if i alt-tab out to look at Task Manager it seems like 6 to 8 (of the 16 logical cores) have high util while the others are low at any given time. 

 

This is with only Steam, Witcher 3, HWmonitor and task manager open, minimal system tray apps (before and after running the game no CPU core is over about 3% util). I'm curious about the GPUs being 90% or so as well because I thought that was a pretty good indicator that they were also being hit pretty hard and likely bottlenecking? 

[bomerr]

I used MSI afterburner on screen display. 

[Kalm_Traveler]

11 hours ago, bomerr said:

I used MSI afterburner on screen display. 

Thanks, I will give that a whirl tonight after work. Curious to see what throwing in the new 1080 Ti cards will do as well.