Above, you see results for the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti used in our processor reviews. Note how AMD is posting MUCH higher FPS than Intel on the left—around 20% better. This is the Zen 3 microarchitecture IPC advantage, and it is very impressive. In this CPU-limited scenario, there is no doubt AMD is the clear winner. Actually, even the left-most point is not "100%" CPU limited because the GPU is still doing a tiny bit of work, the correct way to interpret this would be "almost completely CPU limited."
As we move to the right on the chart, we see FPS go down, which is expected behavior since the GPU gets busier and busier, which slows things down. Interestingly, the drops are almost symmetrical on both Intel and AMD, at vastly different FPS rates. Only above 40% does the gap between both platforms start to shrink.
At 80%, both AMD and Intel deliver nearly the same FPS rates—we're starting to get more and more GPU limited. Just like "CPU limited" is not a "true/false" value, "GPU limited" is more of a range as well. As GPU load increases, the CPU is left less work because there are fewer frames to perform calculations for. For graphics-related game logic, there is no reason to update states more than once per frame because you can only display updates once per frame. This lowers the CPU usage of the render thread. Other parts of the game logic, like AI, physics, and networking, run at different tick rates, usually a constant rate independent of FPS, so their CPU load is constant throughout this whole test.
