CPU Bound.

[Psyclops]

I have re-searched all over the place but can really get a right answer. I recently bought an Nvidia 7900GTX and am using it with a intel pentium 4 660 3.60 ghz proccessor w/Hyper Threading. I am wondering if i upgrade the processor to a better one (one that is better than mine but not a great one necessarily) will my frame rates in games get better or any overall game performance.

I check my Windows Task Manager Performance and on Left 4 dead 2 its at about 60% CPU Usage while game is opened so im guessing im not cpu bound yet since its not at 90% or anything that high. My FPS is at about 50-60 at beginning when there no zombies and then when im around zombies it drops to 24-30 and it stays at 28-30 most of the times but, very rarely if at all passes 30. Is looking at the CPU Usage a good way to find out if i am CPU bound?

I would very much apreciate your help. Thanks for reading.

 

[Herr_Koos]

CPU utilization while gaming is a fairly good indication of where your bottleneck is. I'm guessing that the CPU probably spikes further than the 60% you've seen when the on-screen action gets intense. Do you have an application that can monitor CPU usage in the background to check this?

 

[Psyclops]

I dont have any other way besides the Task Manager Performance CPU Usage to monitor cpu. What do you recommend.

 

[Herr_Koos]

I sometimes use Process Explorer, but I prefer RivaTuner. It's primarily used for overclocking and monitoring GPU's, but has a nice CPU usage graph as well.

 

[Psyclops]

Thank you I have seen some of the performances and sometimes go up to 75% or more constantly. If I upgrade from a pentium 4 3.6 to a pentium D 3.2 should i get better performancein games. If so will it be for most games or only a few?


Thanks.

 

[enzo matrix]

Thank you I have seen some of the performances and sometimes go up to 75% or more constantly. If I upgrade from a pentium 4 3.6 to a pentium D 3.2 should i get better performancein games. If so will it be for most games or only a few?


Thanks.

I'm 90% sure that all games made after 2006 can use at least two CPU cores.