Am I CPU limited?

[Martin 71]

Hi,
I've been watching my gpu usage via afterburner during games, and whenever I'm playing a level with more AI the fps will dip, but so will the gpu usage. This made me concerned that I had a cpu bottleneck. I then went into bios and lowered the cpu's clock speed from 4.2 to 3.3 ghz and sure enough the AI sections were even worse. I'm running an i5 2500k. I purchased it in order to get RID of my CPU limiting factor. My cards are 2 Hd 6870s. Does anyone know why this is happening?

 

[3xch4ng3]

Hi,
I've been watching my gpu usage via afterburner during games, and whenever I'm playing a level with more AI the fps will dip, but so will the gpu usage. This made me concerned that I had a cpu bottleneck. I then went into bios and lowered the cpu's clock speed from 4.2 to 3.3 ghz and sure enough the AI sections were even worse. I'm running an i5 2500k. I purchased it in order to get RID of my CPU limiting factor. My cards are 2 Hd 6870s. Does anyone know why this is happening?

I would say this is completely dependent on the game you're running. Your CPU, Sandy Bridge, Is a complete design change from the previous generation. If you're playing an older game that hasn't been optimized to use the latest technology, or is limited to 1-2 threads, will always suffer in FPS when CPU intensive sections occur.

A great example of this is Starcraft II, which is typically a CPU intensive game because of the AI. They've optimized SC2 to run on Sandy Bridge platforms and I've read benchmarks that show a 2nd Gen Core i3 pulling 60+ FPS on Medium-High settings because of it.

To really see if you're CPU is the true bottle neck, you'll have to compare multiple games that push the limits of the CPU and compare the results.

My bet is you're going to see significantly different results when comparing this.

Also, what game are you currently seeing the drop in FPS?

 

[Martin 71]

Actually, that makes a lot of sense. The game that has issues is Crysis. Thanks for the reply

 

[simon12]

What resolution are you using?

 

[Martin 71]

1600x900