New GPU, will my CPU bottleneck?

[Fragility]

Last Night my 6850 suddenly died, so with a disappointing performance experience with battlefield 4 and this being the week leading up to black friday I thought I would set my sights quite high on a replacement. At the moment I'm looking at the 780, 290 and 280x, but my main concern is the prospect of the rest of my build not being up to scratch and causing a bottleneck. My specs are an i5 760 at stock 3.2ghz - I have no experience with overclocking and would prefer to avoid it, but I do have a 212 and the OC genie feature available if needed, 8GB Ram, and a 650w power supply (which I'm pretty sure if enough from what I've read - I'm not planning on overclocking the gpu). I'm using dual 1080p monitors and wanting to run BF4/skyrim/GTAv etc on one and video on the other.

I've actually been toying with the idea of upgrading the entire pc since bf4 came out but decided to wait a while since by build is only 3 years old. I'm thinking that if I was to go for a 780 then I could just upgrade the rest of my system later on down the road, but that wouldn't really work if a 780 is going to be bottlenecked from the start, although a 780 might even be overkill for what I actually need at the moment. My issue with the 280x/770/290 is that they would be less 'futureproof' and the heat/noise/power issues that I've heard about from the AMD cards are a concern.

Also, If I was to upgrade my CPU then I'm assuming that the i5 4670k & i7 4770k would be the obvious choices? And is 8GB of ram sufficient these days?

Thanks.

 

[Coxey]

I'm running with an i5-760 also @ 3.8ghz, with a 7970 OC and get an overall average of 70-89fps in battlefield 4. (Over the span of at least an hour).
The worst I've seen my FPS drop to is around 38 on the Dawnbreaker map with a ton of havoc going down.

Your 650w should be fine, and from what I can tell the it 4670k is pretty much the 'upgrade-to-go-to' from the 760 in terms of gaming. Of course, the 4770k would outperform in games that can utilize the hyper-threading.

I've not ran into any problems yet using 8GB system ram, even with a couple of programs open in the background. (When it comes to gaming)

That's about all I can help with, honestly I don't know where the bottleneck kicks in for the i5 760 so I can't give you a yes or no answer to that, just what my experience is. - I'm sure someone else will get you more definitive answers shortly.

 

[tinytomlogan]

Bottle necking is always over used - bench results will be down because of a lower cpu for no other reason that its a lower cpu

The cpu wont be stopping the gpu from working at all.

 

[Fragility]

Coxey, are you running BF4 at ultra for those benchmarks? Thanks for the info.

The thing I'm worried about is more just a subtle performance decrease on the 780, which in turn would give me about the same performance in the games I'm playing as a card that is £100 cheaper.

Thanks for the response. I guess a lot will also depend on what deals I can find as we get closer to black friday.

 

[Coxey]

Good point, should of mentioned that. That's using "AMD Gaming Evolved by Ratpr" Balanced mode, which is basically majority high, parts ultra.

I turn various thing down from ultra because they either give me a headache, or a disadvantage. (Post processing, anti aliasing post, etc.)

When I next get the time to boot up BF4, I'll list my settings and add it into this post.

On full ultra I think my average fps is around the low-mid 50's, with a max fps somewhere in the 60's.
But I'll have to double check that.

Edit: I only ever play on 48 man+ servers, if that makes any difference.
Edit2: Wasn't sure how to get the screenshot to include FPS but I took one at 70, 65 and 58.
The map just so happened to be the one where I get slightly lower fps than any other map.
The server was a full 48 man on obliteration gamemode.
Settings:

58 FPS:

65 FPS:

71 FPS:

According to the AMD Ratpr software I got an overall average of 78.8 - but I don't really pay much attention to this because when you die or are in the menus you get well over 100 fps (at least I do).

 

[Fragility]

So it looks like BF4 will at least push a 780, which is good since I was worried about it being overkill for standard 1080p gaming. Thanks for the screenshots, I've been playing at 50fps with the bare minimum graphic settings which is kind of disheartening to have to do with a game like battlefield.

 

[MacLeod]

Bottle necking is always over used - bench results will be down because of a lower cpu for no other reason that its a lower cpu

The cpu wont be stopping the gpu from working at all.

Totally totally agree. People drive me nuts considering 1 frame less a bottleneck. That would mean ANY CPU below the $1000 i7-4960X, would be a "bottleneck".

I think it should be defined as does it make a real difference and one that you're gonna actually see in real world game play. 60 fps vs 40 is a bottleneck. 110 vs 105 ain't.

 

[Fragility]

Totally totally agree. People drive me nuts considering 1 frame less a bottleneck. That would mean ANY CPU below the $1000 i7-4960X, would be a "bottleneck".

I think it should be defined as does it make a real difference and one that you're gonna actually see in real world game play. 60 fps vs 40 is a bottleneck. 110 vs 105 ain't.

My concern is that a 780 would be complete overkill for my current system - and possibly for what I would require, where as I could get the same performance from a much cheaper card

 

[Kaapstad]

Totally totally agree. People drive me nuts considering 1 frame less a bottleneck. That would mean ANY CPU below the $1000 i7-4960X, would be a "bottleneck".

I think it should be defined as does it make a real difference and one that you're gonna actually see in real world game play. 60 fps vs 40 is a bottleneck. 110 vs 105 ain't.

For a single GPU an i7 4960X is not the best choice regardless of price, an i7 4770k should be more efficient.

For multi GPU (3 or 4) setups I would rather use a 3930k as they tend to clock higher.

But for e-peen it has got to be a 4960X

 

[MacLeod]

My concern is that a 780 would be complete overkill for my current system - and possibly for what I would require, where as I could get the same performance from a much cheaper card

I don't think a 780 would be overkill for 1080. There are a few games like Crysis 3 that a 780 or equivalent are needed to get a steady 55-60 fps at max settings. Yeah most games won't even make it break a sweat but there are some games that will let it stretch it's legs and there will be more in the future. Also, the more GPU horsepower you buy now, the longer it'll be til you need to buy another.

 

[NeverBackDown]

In may games i have a seen a 280x perform almost as good as a 780...

 

[MacLeod]

In may games i have a seen a 280x perform almost as good as a 780...

A 280X is comparable to a GTX770. There's not a huge gap between a 280 and 780 but the 780 is a decent amount faster along the lines of 10% or so.

 

[NeverBackDown]

A 280X is comparable to a GTX770. There's not a huge gap between a 280 and 780 but the 780 is a decent amount faster along the lines of 10% or so.

280x beats a 770 with ease. 780 is usually only 5fps in front in most games.

 

[Fragility]

Okay so I went ahead and bought a gtx 780 and only just got around to playing some games for an extended period of time, with some interesting results.

In battlefield 4 I am getting around around 50 fps on ultra, with it dropping to around 35 at times. But the weird thing is, is that when I changed everything to medium I didn't get much fps improvement at all and would still experience stuttering. An important point to mention here is that my cpu load is usually always above 90% on each core, I'm not certain if this is a confirmation of bottlenecking or not. I then tried the firing range mode by myself and was getting around 120 fps, so I was thinking that playing on 64 man servers was having more of an impact than I expected.

But then it came to borderlands 2.. naturally I have everything set at max and was getting a solid and much improved 100-120fps until I started engaging in a large gun fight where I would drop down to as low as 25fps with major stuttering (when collateral damage was in effect usually), well below what I was getting before on my 6850. Also with very high core load %'s.

This is making me think that the GPU is trying to pull to far ahead of the CPU and that is what is causing the contrast in fps, because at the end of the day I am still using a quadcore clocked at 2.8ghz. Or maybe I am not providing the gpu with enough cooling and that is slowing down performance - I only have 2 case fans. I guess what I really need to know is if 95-100% cpu load on every core in core temp is a definitive sign of bottlenecking and would be impacting performance that much.

-Apologies if this should have been posted in a new thread