Hardware Bottleneck is a Myth

You only see what you want to see... not only do you contradict yourself but you do it in a way that will confuse people and makes you look like the one "just repeating what you hear in the internet". You do bring up a good point about shitty programming in some games but like you said, bottlenecks do happen wether its crappy programming or crappy hardware.

Hardware bottleneck is not a myth

I guarantee you that if you stick a gtx295 or a 5870 with an intel Pentium 4 from 5 years ago (or however long ago, just grasping for a time frame) it would perform on par with most cards from 2-3 years ago. All current games require a certain amount of cpu and gpu power.

If you cannot meet one of these but far exceed the other, it does not make up for your lack of power on the other front. Your gaming performance is only as good as your weakest link. Look at the recent article TH put out comparing the newer i7 cpus with the older Core2Duo's paired with a gtx295 or 4870x2 both cards performed worse than slower cards while paired with the slower cpu, only showing their power once paired with a top end cpu.

There are in fact hardware bottlenecks.

There is also shitty programming.

There is a difference and both do in fact exist.

I hate it when people whine about poorly written software and have never written a line of code in their life.

Hardware bottleneck is not a myth....A cpu surely CAN bottleneck a graphics card.

I hope the scope of these types of questions/statements dont increase as LRB enters the gfx market

We all may yet be surprised. Spend some time at the cpu section, where the cpu can do no wrong heheh

out of all the cards in that recent article , gtx 295 scales nearly linearly to better processors/cores , but whereas the 4870x2 not so much , and overall it seems that sli scales better then xfire but depends on a powerful cpu to unleash itself . the i7

as a personal thought i would prefer nvidia's better scaling to make full use of gpu horsepower rather than saving some dollars on the cpu . but it looks like single gpu cards (gtx 285/260) do not depend on multiple cores to give their best . with dual cores , there were many situations where gtx295=gtx285 !!! this is a hardware bottleneck and a disadvantage for those with dual cores .

also , it remains to be seen how they will actually use dx11's multi-threaded rendering , like how this will affect both single cards and sli/xfire and how well with more cores .

overall , you have to have quad cores for multiple gpus if you wanna make the most . or else get a single card with more shaders like the 4850 beats the 3870x2 .

these days , good budget builds = dual core + single gpu (not even x2's)
ftw build = quad core with multi gpu.

coming to software , there are many reasons why a game is never optimized for YOUR system :-

1. they need to maintain compatibility on a variety of platforms . this alone is the biggest reason.
2.you could write the best quality code etc , test it and optimize it but there is a limit on budget vs time etc .

or better , the fermi but going from nvidia's history of :-

6800 ultra : i could be wrong , but>500 for some versions .
8800gtx : 600
280gtx : 650
fermi : let keep out fingers crossed and pray ! it will have all the goodness of single cards . but where the hell are leaked benchmarks

yes , single threaded performance always pays off , be it through oc'ing , or better instructions per clock (nehalem vs core 2) . and look at how lower clocked nehalem is comparable to amd phenom at higher clocks , example , i5 750 and phenom 965 "BE" .

i am looking forward to this kind of IPC improvement in sandy bridge which should hopefully succeed bloomfield , and i will sell my system (i dont even dream about the sandy bridge being compatible on x58 in spite of having it , considering intel compatibility history) .

looking at the past , when i built my 1366 in 2008 , i thought i was hurrying by not waiting for dropped prices , but they did not drop anyway , be it mobos or cpus except ddr3 which has gone down .

Aww, I'm late to this thread... I always love explaining bottlenecks!

Anyway.. OP should stay in school.. Jay et al have the bases covered..

A bottleneck is a fundamental of system design. It is one of the first things you will ever learn about if you take any courses related to it, in architecture, computer science, engineering, physics... and so on.

Sure, software can be a bottleneck too (multi threading is a fine example of this) but you would have to know nothing about how a computer, or any complex system, works in order to think there could be no other limiting factors..

But to be fair.. I have to work with people that believe the LHC is being sabotaged by time travelers... not believing is bottlenecks is a ways down the "wow, where are you hiding the acid?" list. I think I'm gong to have to publish that list in fact... Now, should alien abductions be higher or lower than religion?

Two bottlenecking truths:

1) ANY part can bottleneck a system, and depending on what you are doing on the same computer it can be either the: hard drive, CPU, Graphics Card, Memory or Bus/Controllers.

2) BALANCING is the key to building a computer.

Come on JDJ keep up everything is overpriced and should be reduced

To the OP

Mactronix

1. its not ati's fault but a supply problem , ati would like to sell more numbers for a lower price for high total revenue , rather than few 400$ chips . i would not recommend patience to anyone rather than paying this amount .

2.another indirect cause is lack of competitive threats . remember how the gtx 280 was 649$ at launch , and people who got it were not too happy when it dropped just a few months later , or were they ? consider the pre-athlon days for cpu's . that being said , the i5 750 , while being a solid value proposition , has hyper threading disabled just for coaxing people to get i7 , not because of a tech limitation or something like that .

3.god alone knows how and when these problems would get sorted out , like supply for ati , and how fermi while being truly innovative , would mean to gamers .

again , looks like the christmas/new year holiday season which is just a month or so away from now , may not be enough for all this to sort out .

Epic fail on everyone's posts.

Also LOL @ "17 pages about cpu bottleneck" that is actually about building a system, with only a few pages dedicated to CPU's which also don't show bottlenecks at all.

Youre wrong, need some more years behind you, and yes, a cpu can bottleneck a gpus functions

Support evidence to show that a CPU can bottleneck a GPU.

Oh wait, you can't. Why? Because they don't.

CPU's can bottleneck a game's performance, causing it to lag.
CPU's [can bottleneck an entire system if it's that crappy.

But CPU's CANT bottleneck a GPU.

Also, I don't generalize like you. In some twisted unrealistic setup- yes a CPU could bottleneck a gpu's functions. Also, you forgot that "gpu's" is possessive...

If you want to somehow program gpu drivers to specifically bottleneck a cpu, then by all means go ahead! It's certainly possible. But in reality, the CPU can't bottleneck the GPU. If you're gonna talk about bottleneck, at least use the right terms. Say "The CPU can bottleneck gaming performance." A game's performance isn't the GPU, it's the... game's performance...

You need some more years behind you, and a lot of research to educate yourself away from the ignorant myth that somehow the CPU bottlenecks the GPU, rather than the entire system.

You might as well be saying "The CPU bottlnecks the DVD drive, causing low FPS!" because that would be as true as what you're saying. In fact, I think your bottleneck is not your CPU or GPU- but your brain and inability to process information.

Sorry
No upgrade for that!

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 74-10.html
Left 4 Dead at 1680x1050, best example of a CPU bottlenecking a GPU that i can find.

Now lets define bottleneck, The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition defines a bottleneck as:
A hindrance to progress or production

In this case it would be anything that hinders the production of frames that can be displayed on the screen. The CPU is the only thing that feeds the GPU the information that it needs to produce the frames, if the CPU is unable to do this then it becomes a bottleneck to the GPU, not to the whole system as it is not hindering data being transfer to or from the RAM or the HDD.

As the GPU is complete in charge of rendering the frames that can be displayed on screen, anything that reduces the number of frames that the GPU can produce aside from the GPU itself is therefore bottlenecking the GPU.

The games performance however stands bottleneck free as nothing is bottlenecking the CPU from running the game as fast as it possibly can aside from itself and a component cannot bottleneck itself.

What YOU lack is reading comprehension, and even worse, you lack a basic understanding of how a GPU works.

You argument doesn't even hold true since like I first pointed out to you a GPU must be fed by a CPU regardless of what task it's doing, so it can be bottlenecked by a CPU in games, 3Dmodeling, GPGPU tasks, and petty much anything you can throw at it where the CPU cannot keep up to the requirements of the GPU if either it needs to be fed by or output to the CPU.

End of story.