Bottlenecking this hard?? Please help!!

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thisguy321

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Hey guys, I had just got back into PC gaming and decided to upgrade my video card of my old gaming rig. I ended up picking up the ZOTAC 1080TI AMP Extreme Edition. Let start by first mentioning I am still on 1080p with a 144hz monitor. I know the video card is overkill for 1080p gaming but thought it would help out the 144hz refresh rate until I decide to make the jump to 1440p or 4K. Anyway I started to play some games like Battlegrounds, Project Cars, Shadow of Mordor and Overwatch. I noticed I was not getting the frames I was expecting and was not correlating to the benchmarks I have seen online. I know my CPU is dated and my Ram as well but I didn't expect it to bottle neck this hard.

I performed a clean Windows 10 Pro 64bit install as well as have the latest drivers installed and even flashed my bios to the latest version.

These are the FPS I am getting in each game maxed all the way out:

1) Shadow of Mordor: 95-100fps constant. I turned no cap FPS on in settings and doesn't seem to want to go over 100 FPS. Also does not dip below 95 at any time. To me it seems capped and was wondering if I was doing something wrong.

2) Project Cars: With rain and other cars on the screen I am getting like 40-60FPS. Very disappointing.

3) Overwatch: 150-180fps. I have seen some streamers on twitch with a less powerful video card get 200+ FPS.

4) Battlegrounds: 50-80FPS Also thought this was very dissapointing.

5) World Of Warcraft: About 60fps in a main city with no action going on. With action would it dip to 40-50fps? Maybe lower? This really dissapoints me and truly feel this is not the norm.

These are my specs as follows:

CPU: i7 3820 @ 3.6ghz Sandy Bridge

Mobo: EVGA X79 FTW

RAM: 24GB DDR3

PSU: Corsair HX750

Monitor: Asus 1080p 144hz

I bought the video card from micro center so I have 30 days to exchange or return. Do you guys think the card is faulty? Should I exchange or return the card?

I just find it hard to believe CPU and RAM can give me a significant boost in FPS. For example I have seen some streamers get 200+ fps in Overwatch whereas I am only getting 150-180fps. Can a CPU and RAM increase the FPS by 50-100FPS?!?

I understand 1080p does not utilize the card but I would think if my card is more powerful than some other streamers I've viewed or even my friends that I should be getting better performance in the same games.

Am I missing something here? Any advise is appreciated, thank you!
 
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thisguy321

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I have read that too but shouldn't I be getting better performance than my friends that are also gaming on 1080p on the same games listed above? Only difference is I have the more powerful card. Shouldn't I be getting better frames than them given the games are the same?
 
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HHJ_99_12

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Your CPU is the major bottleneck here. You need to upgrade to something like an i7-7700K. The gains from this upgrade would be huge in your case. There is even a nice FPS boost going from an i7-4790K to the i7-7700K, the move from your CPU would be massive.
 
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HHJ_99_12

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It wouldnt matter if you had a GPU that was 1000x faster than a GTX 1080 Ti, your old and low clocked CPU simply cant keep up with the graphics card and it's a major bottleneck.

 
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thisguy321

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So, is it safe to say that I will performance leaps in the range of 50-100fps on top of the FPS I'm getting now with just a CPU upgrade? These numbers are based off the performance my friends are getting and viewing other streamers playing the same games.

What I don't get is my friend has a 980ti and an i7 4xxx and he is getting better frames than me in the same games on 1080p. My gripe with this is my CPU is only one generation older than his but my GPU is a TON faster. Why the huge discrepancy in performance between my friend and I?

I bought the card from microcenter and the point of me asking this is to see if I should look into returning or exchanging the video card to see if its defective.
 
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joex444

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https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17VRKPjyiTBx9Ewc2xkmaMZD2tA3gSOG3rNtH4OEiz3g/edit#gid=0

For a GTX 1080, non-Ti, an i7-3820 would lead to some CPU bottlenecking. Since your CPU is not overclocked, it seems pretty likely that with a GTX 1080Ti you are going to run into a good deal of bottlenecking.

With the RAM, 24GB is certainly enough... but you have a weird configuration. Since X79 is quad channel, you should have four matched DIMMs and the board only has 4 RAM slots. The most natural configurations are either 16GB (4x4GB) or 32GB (4x8GB), but since you are between these it implies 2x4GB + 2x8GB for 24GB. This should result in the first 16GB being quad channel and the last 8GB being dual or single channel. In particular since games are run on top of operating systems, it's somewhat more likely that your game is using that last 8GB of RAM than it is that your OS is using it. Removing your 4GB sticks would give you 16GB of *dual* channel RAM, but replacing your 4GB sticks with 8GB sticks would give you 32GB of *quad* channel RAM.

Without knowing more about your RAM speed and CAS latency, but basing it just on the i7-3820 and X79 I would suspect that your DDR3 is relatively low performance by today's standards. I'm certainly not thinking you should replace your RAM entirely, but it does make sense to me that your RAM is creating latency issues that lower your performance. There has been some work lately that has shown how important dual channel memory is in mainstream platforms and why using a single memory module is not good for gaming. While I'm unsure if the Intel Flex memory is activating itself as 16GB at quad channel and 8GB at dual, or 16GB at quad and 8GB at single, or 24GB at single due to the mismatched memory module sizes all of these are worse than 32GB at quad channel so replacing the 4GB modules with a 2x8GB kit may be a wise idea.

On the other hand, an i7-3820 will bottleneck a GTX 1080 non-Ti in CPU heavy games and it seems you're already running into this. A 1080p 144Hz monitor is actually harder to drive than a 1440p 60Hz monitor and of course in order to get 144FPS it implies that you can draw a complete frame in less than 1/14 s = 7.15ms. Hopefully viewing it this way gives you an idea of why RAM latency is a possible culprit here as you essentially have very low tolerances for latency in order to get such a high frame rate and even the addition of 500us (0.5ms) is the difference between 144FPS and 130FPS (1000ms / 7.65ms/frame).
 
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HHJ_99_12

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Yes, you will be well in excess of 50FPS gains with a 7700K and a GTX 1080 Ti. Check out the link below

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-7740x-kaby-lake-x-cpu,5107-5.html

The 7700k with only a GTX 1080 is hitting its GPU-limit of 153fps. In this case, the CPU has MORE than enough power to feed frames to the GPU,resulting in maximum FPS for the GTX 1080.

Given that the 1080 Ti is ~30% faster than the 1080, you can expect to see an additional 40-45FPS when paired with a 7700K.

So in your case, your old CPU isnt powerful enough, considering the IPC increase and vastly superior frequencies of the 7700K. It is greatly holding back your Ti. That is your bottleneck. Time for an upgrade

 
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thisguy321

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^^ How do you explain my friend getting better frames in the same games listed above with a 980ti and an i7 4xxx. His CPU is only one generation ahead but my GPU is more powerful.

Shouldn't I at least be getting equal if not better performance than him, regardless of my bottleneck as his CPU isn't that much better than mine and his GPU is worse than mine. Sorry for all the questions, I understand my CPU could be better but I feel the numbers do not match up when comparing to a similar or worse build than mine on the same games.
 
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HHJ_99_12

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The reason is because his newer and much faster i7 can process and submit substantially more frames to his 980Ti to render than your CPU can supply to your 1080Ti. Your CPU is essentially making your 1080Ti perform like a GTX 980 because it simply isnt fast enough to keep your graphics card fed with frames to render.


You cant simply say "his CPU is only one generation ahead ", that is only part of the story. His instructions per clock (IPC) is substantially better (he's two generations ahead, not one. Ivy Bridge was next after Sandy Bridge), and his frequency is a lot higher as well especially if he's overclocked.


There really isn't much more to it. Your CPU is the bottleneck. Your ONLY solution is to upgrade your mobo/ram/CPU if you want to even come close to using 50% of your 1080 TI's full potential.


 
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HHJ_99_12

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If you want to experiment some, load up afterburner and enable the on screen display to show you your CPU usage and your GPU usage. You will see that your CPU usage will be very high meanwhile your GPU usage is very low. If you arent constantly seeing 95%+ on your GPU usage, your CPU is holding your graphics card back.


Here is a good video to watch to learn more about this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6qAoDquTgo
 
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HHJ_99_12

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You may want to try to overclock your CPU to squeeze some more frames

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/18fjx4/guide_so_youre_trying_to_overclock_the_i73820_i/
 
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rcald2000

rcald2000

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thisguy321 As crazy as it sounds, I agree that your CPU is probably bottlenecking your 1080 Ti. My experience is that a 1080 Ti GPU requires a minimum of an i5-7500. The i5-7500 is has a 18% theoretical performance improvement over your i7-3820: http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-3820-vs-Intel-Core-i5-7500/m739vs3648

And the i5-7500 is only fully sufficient when the game is well optimized; Overwatch comes to mind. PUBG is not optimized yet. I also believe that a Intel Pentium G4560 can handle up to a GTX 1060 6GB or RX 580, with a well optimized game.

I agree with HHJ_99_12; you should overclock your i7-3820, if that is an option with your motherboard. Otherwise you'll need to upgrade platforms.

 
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rcald2000

rcald2000

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Correction: I need to backtrack for a moment. Have you check the CPU temps of your processor while you're playing? While I would expect some bottlenecking, your frames are way too load. Run HWmonitor while gaming for five minutes and then please report your temps back here. Sorry for the back-and-forth.
 
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thisguy321

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Quick update for everyone who has been kind enough to take time out to reply to this thread. I downloaded MSI Afterburner in attempts to monitor gpu usage, cpu usage and temps.

I have only tried this in Shadow of Mordor and this is what I got:

FPS: 100 Once again it seems its locked at 100 fps as it barely moves under this number or over. Pretty much a constant 100 fps
GPU TEMP: 60 degrees Celcius
GPU USAGE: 47% at 2050MHZ
CPU TEMP: 73 degrees Celcius
CPU USAGE: 28% ( have seen it jump to 50s )
CPU 1 USAGE: 38% ( have seen this number jump to 50-60% )
CPU 2 USAGE: 9%
CPU 3 USAGE: 38%
CPU 4 USAGE: 8%

This is with everything maxxed out at 1080P resolution. Based on what everyone has said if my CPU was bottlenecking shouldnt the usage be alot higher than the 28-55% usage?

Also GPU usage at 47% is hardly idling in my book. Its almost using half the power. Both GPU and CPU usage in game is similar with CPU usage being a bit higher. I have also read other threads where people have the same CPU as me with a 1080 NON ti and are getting better frames than me.

Please tell me what is wrong.... I was also told a new CPU would not return a FPS GAIN of 50. In example if I am getting 100 FPS now and I upgrade my CPU I will not be getting 150FPS.

What am I doing wrong?
 
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maxalge

maxalge

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you will never hit 100% usage in games that dont use all your cores, most dont use more than 4

this is not true, depending on how cpu bound a game is you can easily gain massive fps

there is a pretty huge gap between your stock cpu and a 5ghz 7700k in gaming
 
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