Hi All.

I have a pretty modest system:-

MSI H81M-E35-V2 mb
i5 4460 cpu
8gb hyper x 1600 ram
2 x 120gb ssd
500w psu

I play games on a 720p plasma.

I had a 960 in this system and was pretty happy with it. But the time had come to upgrade so I switched it for a 1060. Specifically:-

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/inno...ddr5-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-06b-in.html

Most online benches show the 1060 kicking almost twice the framerate of the 960. Now, I appreciate the rest of my system is not great; im not so naive to believe I would double my performance. But I expected a decent 20%-30% boost.

But, to my surprise, I saw very little difference. Some games eg Hitman Absolution, benched exactly the same as my 960. Ive tried GTA5, Primal and Tomb Raider. All show very little improvement.

I know my PC is likely bottleneck-ing due to the other components, but even taking that into consideration, getting virtually no performance bump seems a bit off. Maybe the card is faulty? Do any of you knowledgeable chaps have a clue whats going on? Is my CPU/MB/RAM really so poor as to see very little improvement?

Looks like a nice card you have. My guess would be that your CPU is bottlenecking it, though, which is typical at lower resolutions. Overclocking the CPU will help with this, but if it's not a K variant then you will struggle to get a good OC.

Really?

My 8320 doesn't seem to bottleneck my 390x and the 8320 is a lesser cpu?

Begbie said:

Really?

My 8320 doesn't seem to bottleneck my 390x and the 8320 is a lesser cpu?

Click to expand...

A 8320 bottlenecks the crap out of a 390X. Skylake gets the most out of the 390X's.

Wucked said:

Looks like a nice card you have. My guess would be that your CPU is bottlenecking it, though, which is typical at lower resolutions. Overclocking the CPU will help with this, but if it's not a K variant then you will struggle to get a good OC.

Click to expand...

Indeed, I expected my CPU to hold it back. But not to the point where I see no improvement over a 960. If high end systems are getting twice the framerates, wouldn't my bottlenecked system get a 20% boost at least? Can my CPU really gimp the GPU that badly?

bongpig said:

Indeed, I expected my CPU to hold it back. But not to the point where I see no improvement over a 960. If high end systems are getting twice the framerates, wouldn't my bottlenecked system get a 20% boost at least? Can my CPU really gimp the GPU that badly?

Click to expand...

The evidence is right in front of you. It's also the reason why so many people go for the K variant. It's easy to get between 4.0 - 4.5 Ghz from a 4670k, up from your 3.2 Ghz its a significant increase which would all but eliminate your bottleneck. And it's not a high end CPU, but still very good for gaming.

OP, suggest you run Firestrike, Unigine Valley and Heaven benches. Take note of the Graphics scores and fps and then compare with other GTX 1060 results. They should be more or less the same, regardless of CPU. CPU doesn't have a huge impact on these (other than the Physics score and Combined score in Firestrike, which you can ignore).

Then you'll get a better idea of whether it's the card or CPU.

You should also first do a complete uninstall of the graphics drivers, and re-install, to see.

Would the framerate be locked on a 720p plasma?

chroniclard said:

Would the framerate be locked on a 720p plasma?

Click to expand...

Very big bottleneck.

From previous reading on this thread, including a thread where someone went from an 8320 to a skylake.the improvement was minimal. I doubt the cpu us bottlenecking, but I've seen no evidence of it on my machine. Maybe a little, obviously but not to any extremes.

chroniclard said:

Would the framerate be locked on a 720p plasma?

Click to expand...

HDMI issue or the like also?

Well 720p is where the real issue lies here.

I'd be surprised if the 960 was even running at 100% at that resolution.

As others have said 720p is the issue here. The 960 should have been fine at that resolution. You will usually hit CPU bottlenecks much more easily at lower resolutions which is what you are experiencing here.

One thing you can do is use MSI Afterburner/Rivatuner or EVGA PrecisionX to monitor GPU usage with the On Screen Display. I bet you're not hitting 99% GPU usage in the test you're running and therefore not seeing any extra FPS from the 1060.

afterburner OSD and check in-game usage of GPU & CPU, this will help determine if the GPU is being bottlenecked by the CPU.

Don't play at 720p for a start.

CPU and resolution. Change em.

Replace that plasma screen.

The 4460 should be fine with a 1060 even at stock. But as stated the real issue here is the resolution.

720p will be causing quite a CPU bottleneck. You really need to upgrade to a 1080p screen. Not only to get rid of the bottleneck, 720p is ancient now and a 1060 would be and quite clearly is wasted on it anyway.

A 1060 is pretty much the perfect card for 1080p 60fps.

So did you replace your 960 due to insufficient vram (2GB) because otherwise this card should be more then enough to push constant 60fps in the games you mentioned at 720p.

Thanks for all the input chaps. I had no idea gaming at 720 would be causing this. I dont quite understand why. If somebody can explain in dummy terms I would appreciate it. Are you suggesting I would see very little performance drop if I jumped up from 720 to 1080 with the same components?

Unfortunately my plasma doesn't like anything other than 720. I absolutely love the colour reproduction on my panel. Far more than any LCD ive seen, so im really reluctant to change the screen for something with an inferior picture, which is what I will get unless I spend north of £600. Maybe I can figure out a way to send 1080 to it...

Im going to try some of the benches suggested and see what I get.