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All CPUs bottleneck any mid- to high-end graphics card made in the past 5 years in most recent games. I saw a doubling in minimum framerates with an HD7950 pretty much across the board going from a Q9550 at 3.6GHz to an i5 6600K at 4.5GHz. The scaling carries on beyond 4.7GHz in my case, but I'm happy to stick at 4.5.
There have been a lot of posts recently showing confusion over what the new Vulkan and DX12 APis bring to the table. Some people mistakenly seem to think there is some kind of magical instantaneous performance boost and any card that doesn't get faster is somehow not supporting the API. this is somewhat flawed logic, the primary advantages, at least in the near term, is reduced CPU overhead. The multi-threading and reduced draw call overheads reduce any CPU bottlenecks.
if performance doesn't increase, that merely means there isn't a CPU bottle-neck with the specific GPU and CPU combo. This is very apparent when looking at a low-end GPU combined with a high end CPU which sadly is frequently the case in reviews. Things get very interesting when the CPU power is reduced
here we can see with a last CPU the 1060 doesn't see a big gain in performance, which indicates there is no CPU bottleneck and the OpenGL have a low overhead and well optimized. In contrast, the 480 sees a very healthy gain in performance which means the card is suffering some kind of bottle neck in OpenGL. A combination of high driver overhead and limitations of the GPU front-end coming to play.
However, with older slower CPU's even the 1060 starts to see very healthy gains in performance using Vulkan, in fact performance keeps very close to the experience with the fast CPU. The 1060, Vulkan API and the NVidia Vulkan drivers are doing exactly what is expected - reducing the bottleneck of the CPU.
The 480 still see a good benefit form using Vulkan but even there the performance is degraded significantly with slower CPUs. The effect is so big that the 1060 commands a significant performance lead, be it in openGL or Vulkan over the 480.
This is soemthign to keep in ind if you have an older computer and are looking to buy one of the new mainstream GPUs . Performance with a very high end CPU may not be painting the true performance picture.
Yes there is.
