Ryzen 5 and High End GPU Bottleneck

Mr_Furball

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Jan 24, 2014
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Hi,

I just wanted to know for curiosity if an Ryzen 5 2600 would bottleneck a GTX 1070, 1080, Titan...
Because I know that an i5 would. I'v seen a 1070 perform the same fps that a 1060 on Dying Light because their were testing with an i5. Obviously it held down the 1070. Lots of people asked before but they just want to know if it bottlenecks or not. I wanted to know why. Is it just because of hyper-threading? I set my mind that the ryzen 5 would bottleneck because its mainstream and not high end. But that's just semantics in this case, right? It has the same number of cores and threads that the i7 8700.

Anyway, that's my question. Thank you in advance.
 
Solution
I think worrying about bottlenecking is coming at the question from the wrong angle. If you're putting together a gaming system, the games you play, the resolution you use, the game settings you like to use, and the framerate you expect to get will all help determine which CPU and which videocard is best for you.

There's no point to worrying if a 2600 will bottleneck a 1080 because if you're doing it right you're not randomly pairing a 2600 and a 1080. You would already know which two components you need and why.

As far as just being curious goes, one component will always be a bottleneck. Something in your system will always be holding back performance. So it might be the CPU, then you upgrade the CPU and now it's the videocard so...
Bottlenecking will occur in any place in your system. The question we need to be answering is how MUCH will you feel that bottleneck? What refresh rate are you playing at? The 2600 will bottleneck a 1070 at 1080p 240hz+, but it's very minor. The bottleneck from your CPU decreases even further as resolution increases.

There's a whole bunch of literature on why bottlenecking occurs, but here's the run-down of it: MANY game developers use API's that are not fully capable of taking advantage of the CPU. It's more of the software being behind the hardware, at least if I remember correctly. Also, the 8700 is faster due to its higher clockspeeds/IPC, it gets really hairy as you get down to the nitty-gritty.
 
I think worrying about bottlenecking is coming at the question from the wrong angle. If you're putting together a gaming system, the games you play, the resolution you use, the game settings you like to use, and the framerate you expect to get will all help determine which CPU and which videocard is best for you.

There's no point to worrying if a 2600 will bottleneck a 1080 because if you're doing it right you're not randomly pairing a 2600 and a 1080. You would already know which two components you need and why.

As far as just being curious goes, one component will always be a bottleneck. Something in your system will always be holding back performance. So it might be the CPU, then you upgrade the CPU and now it's the videocard so you upgrade the videocard and now it's the CPU again...
 
Solution
Fast RAM will improve performance of Ryzen CPUs. And, a few games respond to more cores making game play smoother even if average frames per second is lower than a faster CPU with fewer cores.

Please tell us the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor because that will determine the best video card needed.

High resolution and high refresh rates tend to flatten frames per second simply because all high end video cards will be struggling to keep the monitor refreshed. On the other side of the coin, 720p and 1080p monitors will not yield the performance capabilities of the fastest video cards. This is often true because game code often caps frames per second.

If you have a 1080p monitor at 60Hz, like I do, an Nvidia 1070 will do fine. Some games require more GPU power than others and those will make use of a faster video card, even at 1080p.

By the way, I have an MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning and does fine in games. It is comparable to a non-overclocked GTX 1070 Ti, I know because I benchmarked and checked. You can see my computer info by hovering your mouse over my avatar.

I performed this benchmark some time ago, however, it is valid: 3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score 20 585
Link: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/13084482