How to tell you upgrade will help

[hornetstinger]

I have a older system, is there any way of finding out if a new GPU will help frame rate, or that my CPU /PCI-e system bus will be bottleneck?

Fyi pc is Intel Xeon 5670 at 3.2ghz 16gb ram ATI 480 8gb

 

[kalniel]

There's always a bottleneck somewhere. But the quick test is just drop resolution and see if your framerates increase. If so, you were GPU bottlenecked and a new GPU will likely help.

 

[MissChief]

Most games are still GPU bound in that you’ll nearly always see a boost with a graphics card upgrade,