Can I lower GPU performance so I avoid a bottleneck?

[Dater]

Hi

Ive got an I3-6100 and an RX 580, which is bottlenecking my CPU badly. Im saving some money so I can buy an I5-8400. But meanwhile, Im looking for a temporary solution

[Spotty]

Your CPU is bottlenecking your GPU. This means that your CPU is not fast enough to keep up with your GPU.
Making your GPU run slower won't help the problem, and once it reaches the point where it is slow enough that the CPU is no longer slowing it down, it will start making things worse since it the system is no longer performing as good as it can.

Since your CPU is not overclockable, there's nothing you can really do without a hardware upgrade. The i5 8400 and RX 580 should be a fairly even match for each other where neither is significantly bottlenecking the other.

What resolution and refresh rate are you running at?

[Herman Mcpootis]

just leave it as-is until you get the money for the i5.

[Cookybiscuit]

I think this is peak bottleneck hysteria.

[Daniel644]

you clearly don't understand the concept of bottle necking, your CPU is preventing the GPU from performing to it's maximum, not the other way around, what you can do (if AMD has anything like this) is to "SuperSample" (which is basically having the GPU render at a higher resolution then your monitor can display), so you use more of the GPU power, basically it's like running at a higher resolution and minimizes how much the CPU is "bottleknecking" the GPU.

 

all that lowering the GPU speed would do is lower your framerate, it won't make the CPU run faster.

[ChernobilChuck]

Bottlenecking means you can't get the max performance out of a specific hardware, your example is the GPU, for example your cpu can do 50fps a certain game and the gpu can do 100fps on that game, you will run at 50fps, so you are not getting the max performance out of your graphics card, you are bottnecking it, if you reduce the performance of your gpu(underclock it, yes you can) for example your graphics card will be able to do 70fps on that game, you will still run at the same 50fps as before, and on top of that if there is a game/place in a game which requires less cpu power for example your cpu will be able to do 80fps at that place you will lose out on 10fps because you reduced your gpu from 100fps to 70fps.

 

of course this fps thing is way different in real life scenarios but i feel like this is a nice illustration about bottleneck and why you shouldn't reduce the performance of anything because of bottlenecking

[wONKEyeYEs]

19 minutes ago, Dater said:

I3-6100 and an RX 580, which is bottlenecking my CPU badly.

I have an i3 6100 with an R9 390x and it's only about 10% slower in fps than with an i7 6700k.