Identifying GFX card bottlenecks

[harr88]

My computer is rather old, a Q6600(Aug 2007) running a Nvidia 660Ti in PCIe 1.1.

I don't really have any huge problems with the light gaming I do, but with all the deals lately I've been tempted to purchase a new one, but rather than just impulse buying (bc it's new and shiny) I'd like to see if my gfx card is actually being bottle-necked by my cpu/mobo/ram.

So I'm not sure about any standardized benchmark results, something that's free and I can compare my settings to others 660Ti's (using same settings and resolutions) to determine if my mobo/cpu/ram are impacting my gfx card performance significantly?

Thanks.

 

[lavaheadache]

What resolution do you play at? You should be mostly fine but I would imagine your system is going hold you back some.

Sorry I do not know of anywhere that you can find info to compare against your system other than asking around.

 

[harr88]

I usually play 1920x1080 with everything on low, running non-native rez looks really ugly.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

660 Ti is more than capable of handing most games near ultra @ 1080p.

 

[blastingcap]

Change the resolution lower and see if that impacts framerate. If it does not, then your CPU is bottlenecking. Otherwise your GPU is bottlenecking.

 

[RussianSensation]

Some games are CPU limited, some are GPU limited and some are both.

The best thing to do is look at GameGPU that reviews a wide variety of games and search for the games you play/intend to play.

I can tell you that in most modern games, your CPU is a major bottleneck since at stock speeds it's slower than Phenom II X4 955 3.2ghz by 25%+.

Your GPU is much slower but still in your case I'd get a $30-40 cooler and overclock it to 3.2-3.4ghz. Otherwise, I'd consider doing a platform upgrade to be honest. A GPU substantially faster than 660ti is at least $300 USD.

 

[Borealis7]

identifying bottlenecks in the CPU can be done with programs like MSI Afterburner.
run a benchmark like Unigine Heaven in windowed mode and along side it MSI Afterburner with the GPU usage graph next to it. you can also look at the Perofrmance tab of the Task Manager to see CPU usage.
the GPU Usage during Heaven should be pegged at 100%. if you see it fluctuating, it means your CPU is too weak to feed the GPU with information.

example: here is BF4 with a CPU bottlenecking an R9 280X

 

[blastingcap]

yes, I made a similar suggestion earlier today, but I added that you must turn off vsync. vsync artificially dampens load on GPUs so you need it off to get an accurate measurement.

identifying bottlenecks in the CPU can be done with programs like MSI Afterburner.
run a benchmark like Unigine Heaven in windowed mode and along side it MSI Afterburner with the GPU usage graph next to it. you can also look at the Perofrmance tab of the Task Manager to see CPU usage.
the GPU Usage during Heaven should be pegged at 100%. if you see it fluctuating, it means your CPU is too weak to feed the GPU with information.

example: here is BF4 with a CPU bottlenecking an R9 280X

 

[BrightCandle]

GPU-Z/Afterburner is the way to go. If you aren't getting above 80% usage most of the time (you do need to test a variety of scenes and scenarios however as it really varies) you are almost certainly held back by the CPU.

Downclocking the CPU and seeing what difference it makes to the games average FPS can also tell you how much impact the CPU is having, because its rarely a linear scaling factor. Looking at GPU usage is the quickest approach but plotting lots of different CPU speeds and drawing a curve through them is more accurate.

 

[Techhog]

Off topic, but isn't this game capped at 30FPS and unplayable if you remove the cap?