Am I bottlenecked?

[Devrij]

I've noticed a lot of games I'm playing lately (Project CARS, Dying Light etc), I'm getting very low gpu usage (sub 50%, was only 32%in dying light) and high cpu usage (70-90%) across all 4 cores in games, which suggests a bottleneck.

I'm running a 3570k @4.5GHz and 290xfire at stock clocks on a 1440p screen. Surely an overclocked 3570K is still enough these days? I get better fps in pCARS with one gpu purely due to the extra cpu load xfire introduces. That seems a bit nuts to me. Do I really need an i7 or even an extreme chip?

Can anyone else with a similar setup comment?

 

[setter]

Dying light is known to be quite buggy and I haven't played project cars. But a few games I did get bottleneck issues with an i5 and sli. Bf3/4 and Crysis 3 being the ones of note. Games were much smoother when I switched to a 3770k, even when it was clocked lower. 4.2 vs 4.5 on the 3570k.

 

[Devrij]

Dying light is known to be quite buggy and I haven't played project cars. But a few games I did get bottleneck issues with an i5 and sli. Bf3/4 and Crysis 3 being the ones of note. Games were much smoother when I switched to a 3770k, even when it was clocked lower. 4.2 vs 4.5 on the 3570k.

Interesting. I'm getting like mid 40s in Dying light at minimum view distance and medium shadow maps. Clearly the game needs some TLC for PC, but it's frustrating seeing nearly 70% of my gpu grunt wasted. I wouldn't have expected to see THAT heavy a bottleneck. Even a 3770k wouldn't fully alleviate that.

 

[setter]

On the ib setups, with the i5 my cpu use was quite high at 90%, gpu use wouldn't budge over 80%. Switching to the i7 saw a drop in cpu use and a more consistent higher gpu use. This was mostly with bf3. Though I can replicate this on the spec in sig with bf4 by turning off hyperthreading in bios.

 

[Gregster]

Dying light needs AMD to get it sorted at driver level and then it should be better. Same with Pcars and other various games.

 

[Devrij]

Yeah I hope that's the case. I'm trying not to upgrade to a 6 core beast out of frustration though!

 

[setter]

Yep, that's the problem with so many buggy games/drivers at present. Your always left wondering if it might be a hardware limitation in some cases. The games I've listed are known stable ones that do show gains from an i7 in multi card setups.

 

[shankly1985]

Dying light needs AMD to get it sorted at driver level and then it should be better. Same with Pcars and other various games.

Its nothing to do with AMD, the game pushes Core one on the CPU very hard and bottlenecks the rest of the system..

Watch TB video on it and he explains better.

 

[TheRealDeal]

Was playing this at my mates all weekend and it was pretty smooth at nearly max settings and 50% draw distance, fps were around 60 mainly. He did have some settings turned off like film grain and some post processing effects due to him hating them but the game looked good and ran well. His cpu is a 5930 at 3.8ghz so a pretty nice cpu which may have been helping. I heard from others there was also a patch which helped.

 

[Devrij]

Yeah the single core loading was fixed. This is load across all cores. Either games are getting heavier on the cpu, not helped by xfire adding a lot more, or developers are getting lazy