Just bought a MSI GTX 1070 with 8GB and while some games are playing flawlessly at max settings, I find some games like Metro Lastlight have big frame rate drops in certain areas. I also notice this in games like the Total War series (i'm sure this is a very heavy game on the processor.I was wondering if my processor is causing this. What recommendations do you guys have? Thanks
GTX 1070 8GB
AMD FX 8150 at 3.6GHZ
16 G of ram
running at 1080p
At 1080p you are going to notice a significant bottleneck in cpu bound titles, and even a slight to moderate bottleneck in mainly gpu bound titles. I would recommend monitoring gpu utilization in game to verify this. I use OpenHardwareMonitor on my second monitor to watch Gpu-Core utilization but you can use tools such as Msi Afterburner to run an overlay on your game to monitor usage. I am fairly certain it is your cpu, and as an upgrade I would opt for a Skylake based I5 or I7 system, although in some cpu bound games even an I5 is seeming to become somewhat of a bottleneck for the higher end Gtx 1000 series cards. Increasing resolution will also help to alleviate although I would recommend a cpu upgrade first. I'm afraid overclocking your 8150 to its limits will more than likely not fully alleviate the bottleneck, your cpu is plainly to slow for this graphics card.
Well stated.
I concur.
For now you can try, if you have good cooling and a good motherboard, overclock your CPU as high as you can. That will alleviate some of the bottleneck. While not amazing the Piledriver series was a big improvement over Bulldozer which was fairly poor in lightly threaded applications. Upgrade your CPU to some Skylake part and that should get rid of most of it.
also unpark your cores if u can. i had some bottle neck lagging with a 1080p on the division, unparked them at the advice of some other users on the community discord and it fixed it for that title as well as other games.
The AMD FX series are known to bottleneck at higher settings, and not by a small amount either. I sincerely hope Zen rectifies this issue because otherwise Intel maintains their monopoly and they will keep their high pricing :<
I recommend either:
- Unparking cores (as suggested below). This sometimes helps, sometimes doesn't.
- Getting a beefy cooler to crank that 8150 to 4.5GHz+
- Upgrading to an intel platform (I7 or E3 xeon)
Hell I even upgraded from an I5-2400 to an I7-4790k and noticed a significant increase in smoothness in every game or on the desktop even. I almost saw a fairly big increase in minimum fps in some games (Min going from 33 to 55 for example in BF4)
would you recommend something like this as an upgrade? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0158MZERS/ref=nav_timeline_asin?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
Not a bad combo, although keep in mind you would also need new Ram as you would be moving from a DDR3 platform to a DDR4 platform.
For DX11 definitely, but Vulcan or DX12 will alleviate a lot of the CPU overhead and make CPU usage multi-threaded. I think despite being low in IPC, its cores will compensate in the new APIs.