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Is my Ryzen 5600 bottlenecking my 3090?

Install Afterburner and enable the overlay to display GPU and CPU usage as well as each individual CPU core. Check the utilisation while playing a game. The GPU should be maxed out. If not, is one of the CPU cores maxed out instead?

If a CPU core has high utilisation while the GPU doesn't, then it's a CPU bottleneck.

It's better to learn how to spot a bottleneck instead of just being told the answer to your question in my opinion.
 
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5700X3D/5800X3D

I dropped one in mine as a final hooray for AM4 and it made a nice difference to my 6800XT

FeGNVb6.jpeg
 
upgrade to 5700x3d, if you are bottle necked that should help by quite margin and can be had for £130-£140 if you look around.
 
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Depends on the game. My 5700x was bottlenecking my 3080 in CPU-limited scenarios (lots of NPCs in Cyberpunk etc). I went from 85fps to 100fps on the in-game benchmark switching to a 9800X3D. I play at 3440x1440.

I found PresentMon in hwinfo was a big help. Monitoring frametime against GPU/CPU wait time was revealing. CPU utlisation doesn't tell you the full story.
 
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Hi everybody, thanks for your really helpful replies!

Depends on the game. My 5700x was bottlenecking my 3080 in CPU-limited scenarios (lots of NPCs in Cyberpunk etc). I went from 85fps to 100fps on the in-game benchmark switching to a 9800X3D. I play at 3440x1440.

I found PresentMon in hwinfo was a big help. Monitoring frametime against GPU/CPU wait time was revealing. CPU utlisation doesn't tell you the full story.
Bidley, I'm not familiar with frametime vs wait time, and what they mean in relation to each other. Sorry! Could you expand a little, please?
 
@mickyflinn linked a great breakdown.

I was seeing bottlenecking with a 3700X and 3060ti in some cases, and I'm not talking in the V-RAM sense. It absolutely is going to depend on other factors, aka which game and resolution, but it absolutely can happen.

It was enough of a problem that I upgraded to a 4070 from a 3060ti, normally that wouldn't be enough uplift, but the "super" lineup wasn't available and I wasn't willing to pay more for the ti at the time given my bottleneck was largely vram.

I saw an improvement in some respects due to the increased VRAM, but the extra L3 cache offered by the X3D was night and day over what I had for my use case.

It's a lesser case when running at 4K, but if you're into city builders/sims/CoD Warzone and a few other titles? Yeah, it can make a big difference still.
 
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Bidley, I'm not familiar with frametime vs wait time, and what they mean in relation to each other. Sorry! Could you expand a little, please?
So your frametime is the time each frame is displayed for. If you compare that to your CPU and GPU wait time (or busy time), you can see which component is waiting on the other.

For example, if your framerate drops in certain scenes in a game, and you see your frametime is (for example) 10ms, you would then look at the wait or busy times for your CPU and GPU. If, in this scenario, your CPU is busy for 10ms and your GPU is waiting for 10ms, then your GPU is waiting for your CPU and your CPU is holding your performance up. Meanwhile your CPU utilisation could be showing 50-60% which doesn't really tell you much.

In an ideal world you want the frametime to be dictated by the GPU at all times, so your CPU would show less than your frametime in ms as busy. Obviously this won't always be possible depending on the game etc.

It's easier to monitor if you have graphs up in hwinfo. Hopefully that helps, happy for someone more knowledgeable to correct me, but that's how I discovered my CPU bottleneck.
 
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