Just like anything, this can be scientifically measured.
The three facets of performance (excluding RAM here since it's not a major bottleneck in any new-ish system):
CPU
GPU
HDD
These correlate very well to the following performance metrics:
CPU utilization - Task manager
- If single core, this would be 100% / (number of cores on your PC) as a maximum
- If game/app uses n cores, this would be 100% * n / (number of cores on your PC)
- You'll need to do some research to determine how multithreaded your game/app is.
GPU utilization - GPU-Z
- Pretty simple: 100% is max
HDD utilization: Resource monitor
- Is disk queue length significantly greater than one constantly? Spikes are ok, a high baseline indicates performance problems.
Is anything pegged at the maximum? If so, upgrade that. Rinse and repeat until money/time/patience runs out.
That's basically it. There are more subtle cases such as application efficiency / swapping / etc not enabling 100% utilization, but that's a per-app basis.
The three facets of performance (excluding RAM here since it's not a major bottleneck in any new-ish system):
CPU
GPU
HDD
These correlate very well to the following performance metrics:
CPU utilization - Task manager
- If single core, this would be 100% / (number of cores on your PC) as a maximum
- If game/app uses n cores, this would be 100% * n / (number of cores on your PC)
- You'll need to do some research to determine how multithreaded your game/app is.
GPU utilization - GPU-Z
- Pretty simple: 100% is max
HDD utilization: Resource monitor
- Is disk queue length significantly greater than one constantly? Spikes are ok, a high baseline indicates performance problems.
Is anything pegged at the maximum? If so, upgrade that. Rinse and repeat until money/time/patience runs out.
That's basically it. There are more subtle cases such as application efficiency / swapping / etc not enabling 100% utilization, but that's a per-app basis.
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