AMD Athlon a bottleneck for BF3?

[joem1983]

Hi,
I have an Athlon x4 640. It's Oc'd to 3.6.

I also have a ATI HD 6870.

Thing is I've seen benches of people getting way higher FPS than me with the same settings and card. Not sure if my CPU is bottlenecking.
Apparently the game is gpu intensive.
But my CPU seems to be running at around 80% and higher and kicking out a lot of heat (the same as doing benches on the cpu)

Basically I'm hoping someone can tell me that i dont need to plough money at it and find it the same. hmm.

Fairly sure i'll stick with the card till the new 7 series.

ta

 

[eddiew]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-13.html is quite revealing

Run taskmanager while playing: if the CPU graph is regularly nailing itself to the top, then you've found a bottleneck. But that said, my Phenom II @ 3.4 didn't get close to 100% use on all cores. Did get toasty though!

 

[titaniumx3]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-13.html is quite revealing

Run taskmanager while playing: if the CPU graph is regularly nailing itself to the top, then you've found a bottleneck. But that said, my Phenom II @ 3.4 didn't get close to 100% use on all cores. Did get toasty though!

Problem about that benchmark on tomshardware (and most BF3 benchmarks) is that it doesn't really represent actual gameplay. It's a scripted scene from singleplayer, with very little actually going on, hence unusually low cpu usage. Playing, on a packed server on the other hand will increase cpu usage greatly, creating a much bigger bottlekneck.

 

[-Mike-]

Something that you should be able to see on an individual machine with task manager