Bottleneck?

[Dubalazi]

Friend is looking to upgrade some parts and is wondering if the video is gonna bottleneck him a lot or it will be ok , because he wont be able to afford new GPU at the moment.

His current GPU is Ati 6670HD 1gb and he will be getting i5 4670 processor and we are wondering if its gonna be alright?

[Basemath]

What sort of games is he planning to play mostly? WoW, for example, would be safe cuz it's more CPU dependent. Most strategy games too. If his GPU bottlenecks on games like Tomb Raider, etc.. toning down/tweaking graphics would alleviate his pain.

[Cyrops]

If you want to play on max, then GPU will be 'bottleneck'. I'm not really sure if GPU can be considered a bottleneck, as games use GPU the most. Being main part I don't think the term applies. It's like saying 'an engine is a bottleneck for car to go fast'

In engineering, a bottleneck is a phenomenon by which the performance or capacity of an entire system is severely limited by a single component. Formally, a bottleneck lies on a system's critical path and provides the lowest throughput. As such, system designers will try to avoid bottlenecks and direct effort towards locating and tuning existing bottlenecks. Some examples of possible engineering bottlenecks are: processor, a communication link, a data processing software, etc.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottleneck#Engineering


Mmm according to this a GPU can be considered bottleneck.


But to answer your question: the GPU won't be able to keep up with the i5 (but it's the CPU that needs to keep up with GPU).

I recommend buying CPU before buying GPU, if you buy GPU and use it with old CPU you won't see much difference, if the CPU was a bottleneck before.

[Xuvial]

HD6670 is waaaaay behind i5 4670 in terms of CPU+GPU "balance". In something like WoW it won't be that noticeable since it relies mostly on CPU.
But in a GPU-cruching game like Skyrim or Battlefield, HD6670 is going to be the primary bottleneck on framerates.

[Faithh]

If you want to play on max, then GPU will be 'bottleneck'. I'm not really sure if GPU can be considered a bottleneck, as games use GPU the most. Being main part I don't think the term applies. It's like saying 'an engine is a bottleneck for car to go fast'
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottleneck#Engineering

Mmm according to this a GPU can be considered bottleneck.

But to answer your question: the GPU won't be able to keep up with the i5 (but it's the CPU that needs to keep up with GPU).

I recommend buying CPU before buying GPU, if you buy GPU and use it with old CPU you won't see much difference, if the CPU was a bottleneck before.

A GPU is bottlenecking at 99% load and preferably should be the bottleneck (GPU bound scenario) rather than the CPU. GPU bottlenecks are easy to fix, CPU's nowadays is "moar OC or googling when Broadwell is coming out". If you have reasonable fps at 99% load like 60 or 100 then you shouldn't call it the bottleneck but if you have something like 10 fps you should :P

If you want to know when the CPU is bottlenecking, monitor the GPU load because CPU load means nothing nowadays for it.