I was going to buy a 3070 to pair with a 5900x but I've been advised that it can cause games to run badly with it being too powerful for the resolution and the cpu having to work harder. I still don't fully understand the technicals around it. But I'm starting to away towards the 3060ti. Would it still be overkill? I guess maxing out the settings would fix things easier than on a 3070. I just don't want to buy the wrong card. P.S. I'm very happy with my 1080p monitor.. Its gsync and very good quality.
Faster hardware will never make your gaming experience worse than slower hardware.
I see a lot of people who don't understand how it all works, so I'll explain! Sorry if any of this feels patronising to read, it's not my intention.
Your monitor's resolution describes how many pixels it has, and how they're laid out.
Your monitor's refresh rate describes how many times the pixels change each second. A 60Hz monitor will update each pixel 60 times per second, to display 60 different images each second.
Most people see a big improvement moving from 60Hz>144Hz, and further improvements quickly diminish.
The improvement gets much smaller as the refresh rate increases further.
The number of frames you will see in a game is limited by your monitor's refresh rate. It doesn't make a meaningful difference whether you get 60fps or 1000fps on a 60Hz display, you're limited to seeing 60 new frames every second.
The Graphics card's job is to figure out what the game should look like, and display that on your monitor.
It does this by colouring in the pixels.
Each graphics card has a limit to the number of pixels it can fill in a given period of time. Stronger graphics cards fill more pixels.
If your monitor has a higher resolution, each image has more pixels. This means that in a set period of time (like 1 second), your graphics card may draw the same number of pixels, but those pixels will be drawn across fewer frames. If you double the pixel count per second, you halve the number of frames per second.
A 1080p (1920x1080) frame will have 1/4 the pixels of a 4k (3840x2160) frame, so a graphics card could draw 4x the frames per second. This is why you may have heard people saying that a 3060Ti is "overkill" for 1080p, because it's more than capable of running games at 1080p at refresh rates 144Hz+. The issue with this claim is that different games are, well, different. On a 3060Ti, most games will run 1080p @ 144Hz/144fps on ultra settings, and still have plenty of headroom, but not all games will run the same. A sleek, competitive game like CSGO might draw 600-700fps
@1080p with the same GPU. The most demanding games today (like Cyberpunk, for example) don't manage to hit 144fps on high/ultra settings at 1080p, so in that case the 3060Ti definitely isn't "overkill".
Now, what does the CPU do?
The CPU calculates everything necessary for the game's world. It calculates positions and trajectories of moving objects, all that sort of thing.
It would be a waste to do this constantly, so the CPU waits until the GPU is ready to draw another frame.
At this point the CPU does all of its calculations, passes the necessary data to the GPU, and the GPU can figure out how to display it all on your monitor.
The CPU does work for each frame that is drawn. More frames = more work for the CPU.
At 1080p, you've got less pixels in each frame, so your frames per second will be higher, this means more work for the CPU.
At 4k, your fps will be much lower, so the CPU has much less work to do.
Stronger CPUs provide the potential for higher FPS. They effectively raise the FPS-ceiling.
At lower resolutions like 1080p, you do generally want a stronger CPU to ensure you benefit from higher frame rates, but with your 5900X, that's about the best you can get right now.
The 3060Ti is certainly a very strong 1080p card, and may be overkill for quite a few games, particularly competitive games which tend to run on low-end hardware, but that doesn't mean it's a bad GPU for 1080p.
It certainly won't make anything worse, it'll just keep trying its hardest to draw as many frames as possible.
You absolutely don't
need a 3060Ti for 1080p, but it's not going to make things worse, and it's not so "overkill" that it's just a total waste of money.
If you're more of a fortnite/CSGO/Rocket league player, it's maybe a bit expensive for what you need.
If you're a big fan of pretty open world games, or AAA titles in general, it's a good choice.