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Smaller bottleneck when turning the setting up and resolution up?

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  • Graphics
Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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August 14, 2013 10:21:11 AM

Is that true? For an examplem if you have like, let's say... AMD Phenom II X4 965 and AMD Radeon HD 7970. If you play on a 1280×720 and you decided to play on 1920×1080 at ultra settings in Battlefield 3, would that avoid the bottleneck?

More about : smaller bottleneck turning setting resolution

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August 14, 2013 10:26:34 AM

If you have a cpu that is powerful enough for 30fps and a graphics card that can get 60fps, your pc will get 30fps because your cpu is being the bottleneck. If you crank up the graphics settings, it will put a higher load on the graphics card and it will now only be able to pump out 40fps. Your pc will still only get 30 fps because of the cpu bottleneck. So, increasing the graphics settings will reduce the bottleneck, but it wont increase frame speed.
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August 14, 2013 10:45:22 AM

flexxar said:
If you have a cpu that is powerful enough for 30fps and a graphics card that can get 60fps, your pc will get 30fps because your cpu is being the bottleneck. If you crank up the graphics settings, it will put a higher load on the graphics card and it will now only be able to pump out 40fps. Your pc will still only get 30 fps because of the cpu bottleneck. So, increasing the graphics settings will reduce the bottleneck, but it wont increase frame speed.


Couldn't have put it better myself. Your CPU almost always dictates the minimum framerate - and to a lesser extent, the average framerate.

Example: my i3-2100 causes infrequent drops below 30fps in Crysis 2, but my GTX 660 is mostly able to play the game at 60fps at 1440x900 (my native res) - so I play the game at 1920x1200 (downsampling via custom resolution) so my average framerate is closer to my minimum framerate. A variable framerate between 30-40fps feels smoother than 30-60fps.
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August 14, 2013 10:57:28 AM

Basically if the GPU isn't giving its full potential because the CPU is holding back.
Cranking up settings usually increases GPU load without affecting CPU load much.
Might as well go as high as possible if it does not affect framerate much.
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