If your PC doesn’t ship the specified efficiency in a selected sport, it’s normally—however not all the time—because of two limiting elements. Either your processor (CPU) or your graphics card (GPU) is bottlenecking efficiency.

How can you discover out which of those two important {hardware} elements is slowing down your gaming efficiency? This information will clarify every little thing you could know. But first, you could perceive what a CPU bottleneck or GPU bottleneck really is, and what it means on your system.

This article was translated from German to English, and initially appeared on pcwelt.de.

Further studying: The best CPUs for gaming and the best GPUs for gaming

What is a CPU bottleneck?

A CPU bottleneck happens when your graphics card works sooner than the CPU. You can inform you’re encountering a CPU bottleneck when your GPU isn’t totally utilized. (The utilization of the CPU is irrelevant.)

If your processor’s efficiency isn’t ample to maintain tempo together with your sport, this will result in a slowdown as a result of the graphics card can’t be totally unleashed. That’s a CPU bottleneck.

What is a GPU bottleneck?

Conversely, a GPU bottleneck happens when your graphics card can not sustain with CPU’s output.

When your GPU is bottlenecked, the graphics card can calculate fewer photos per second than the CPU was in a position to put together beforehand. The system is due to this fact unable to appreciate its full gaming potential. In these circumstances, you’ll most likely must upgrade to a new graphics card to eke out extra efficiency.

How do know in case your video games are CPU or GPU bottlenecked?

A CPU bottleneck occurs when the graphics card does its work in such a short while that it has to attend for the processor to supply the suitable knowledge for the following picture to be rendered. In these circumstances, the graphics card, regardless of how briskly it’s, can’t be utilized to its full capability.

But how precisely can you discover out if there’s a CPU bottleneck? Proceed as follows:

1. Download and set up MSI Afterburner.
2. In Afterburners settings choices, activate the GPU load possibility for the overlay.
3. Start the sport you wish to play.
4. Pay consideration to the GPU utilization fee on Afterburner’s overlay whilst you play. It’s necessary that you just learn the GPU load throughout a typical sport scene. The values within the menu or when paused aren’t significant.

MSI

You can use the GPU load info to find out whether or not there’s a CPU or GPU bottleneck within the sport you’re testing:

≥ 95 %: GPU restrict = The graphics card limits the efficiency
< 95 %: CPU restrict = The processor limits the efficiency

If your graphics card is utilized between 95 and 100%, the processor is robust sufficient and provides the GPU sufficiently. If the GPU is used 80 % or much less, which means you’re hitting a powerful CPU bottleneck.

Your gaming PC has a bottleneck. What do you have to do?

If you discover that your processor is bottlenecking your gaming efficiency, you must select the next decision if doable. Shifting to the next decision (like 1440p or 4K) places extra give attention to the GPU, in case your graphics card and monitor are as much as the duty. If that doesn’t work, you could must upgrade your CPU.

If you discover that graphics card bottlenecking efficiency, strive lowering the graphics high quality presets within the sport first, or at the least lowering extra strenuous graphics results (like ray tracing or texture high quality). Activating picture upscaling options like Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, and Intel’s XeSS also needs to assist, as they render frames at a decrease, extra GPU-friendly decision earlier than utilizing software program to upscale the picture again to your monitor’s decision. If that doesn’t work, you can even strive decreasing your decision (e.g. from 1440p to 1080p).

In the case of a extreme GPU bottleneck, you could must improve to a more powerful graphics card.