About CPU bottlenecks in games

[PCJake]

Hey guys, I've been looking to upgrade my system to get better game performance, since I'm struggling to keep 60 FPS in newer games like Bad Company 2 and Dragon Age: Origins even after turning some graphical settings down. My current system is in my signature and I game at 1920x1200. My goal here is to figure out what the bottleneck in my system is and eliminate it with an upgrade.

My question is this: Is my Q6600, running at 3.33Ghz, likely to be bottlenecking performance in any new games when running at 1920x1200 with high graphics settings? I did a little testing with Crysis: Warhead, Bad Company 2, and Dragon Age (a relatively CPU intensive game), and I found that my CPU usage rarely got above 70-80 percent in any of the games, even when I turned all the graphical settings down to low and set it to the minimum resolution. I assume this means that the CPU isn't bottlenecking my game performance. Is my logic correct? If so, would the next logical step be to look at upgrading my graphics card?

 

[happy medium]

A Q6600 @ 3.33 is just fine for any game out there.

 

[PCJake]

A Q6600 @ 3.33 is just fine for any game out there.

Fair enough, that's mostly what I've heard. Looking at the parts in my system, is there ANY part in it besides the graphics card that may be bottlenecking my game performance at 1920x1200?

 

[Markfw]

and with a GTX280 ? and that CPU ? I would have thought you were fine. Let see what others have to say. You could have a setup issue.

 

[happy medium]

Fair enough, that's mostly what I've heard. Looking at the parts in my system, is there ANY part in it besides the graphics card that may be bottlenecking my game performance at 1920x1200?

No, your system is just fine for gaming @ 1900x1080 high settings and even better when you buy the gtx 480. You should see 50% or better fps.

 

[PCJake]

No, your system is just fine for gaming @ 1900x1080 high settings and even better when you buy the gtx 480. You should see 50% or better fps.

Excellent, excellent. 50% or better FPS would be outstanding. Thanks for your help.

 

[bunit]

This probably seems obvious, but also consider the 5870, it's about $100 less.
I think the general consensus has been that, if you're running a single card setup, the ATI 5 series is a fine, fine choice.
Then again it's up to you and your needs/preference.

 

[PCJake]

This probably seems obvious, but also consider the 5870, it's about $100 less.
I think the general consensus has been that, if you're running a single card setup, the ATI 5 series is a fine, fine choice.
Then again it's up to you and your needs/preference.

The combination of the small performance advantage of the GTX 480 and the fact that I've always gone with NVIDIA in the past is enough that I'm willing to shell out a hundred bucks more for the 480. You're right though, the 5870 looks like an excellent card, especially for the price. ATI seems to be great at providing a good price/performance ratio with their cards.

 

[Ben90]

I did a little testing with Crysis: Warhead, Bad Company 2, and Dragon Age (a relatively CPU intensive game), and I found that my CPU usage rarely got above 70-80 percent in any of the games, even when I turned all the graphical settings down to low and set it to the minimum resolution. I assume this means that the CPU isn't bottlenecking my game performance.

Don't judge bottlenecks by task manager performance. Crysis has an early implementation of multicore code and will never tax all four of your cores. However under heavy physics calculations you would still benefit by having a faster CPU.

But for the most part, I doubt your CPU is holding you back.

 

[beginner99]

80% cpu usage doesn't tell much IMHO.

i mean if a game is limited to cores does 2 will be running at 100% (=50% total on a quad). the remaining around 25% percent can be anything from antivirus, musik player, downloads or anything else ur running in parallel.

But I have no idea how these games are made (eg if such a limit exists, it did on WoW for pretty long time).

 

[mv2devnull]

Graphics card and sound drivers tend to have threading now, so they probably execute on a core different from where the game is. This is about the only way that the single-threaded games might benefit from multi-core CPU.