how do you understand bottlenecks?

Question

how do you understand bottlenecks with things like your graphics card and cpu?
also what are common things to be bottlenecked
this is all in regards to gaming but any answer to do so would be mutch appreciated.
thx.

Answer 1

Well, here's what I would do..



I would research a component, looking up benchmarks of whatever products I take interest in, looking up when the component was released, and examining the features of it.



Example, a well known GPU such as a GTX 590 was released in the year of 2011, and Intel's 2500K Processor was released as well in the same year.



With videos cards, all you have to do is determine it's year of release, and the amount of VRAM which it possesses.



With a CPU, it's pretty simple, your looking for the amount of GHz it's averages, on stock, and the amount of cores it contains.



Example, a GTX 590 would surely be bottle-necked by anything with less than 4 cores, and less than at least 3.00GHz.



Take into account these components were released around the same time, if not the same year.



Sorry if this does not help, as it is much easier for me to determine than to explain, but hopefully you can use this method in future.

Answer 2

The term bottlenecking means when a piece of hardware is limited to performance due to other parts capabilites not matching up with others.

Example -

Desktop computer designed for gaming, total cost was $2100 but the cpu you may buy was only $150. Meaning that all the parts are very high end except the cpu, and this would bottleneck all the other hardware because the cpu is the lowest performing component.



Example 2 -

A desktop computer with a $300 graphics card, $300 cpu, $400Solid State Drive, but for the ram, you only buy 2-4 GB, meaning all the other hardware will be bottlenecked due to parts not being in the same, category of performance.

Think of bottlenecking as pipe with water flowing through it. Where the water flows faster is where you invested more money in higher end parts, but then you buy a 100GB hard drive that only spins at 5400RPM. The pipe is 1" thick but in the middle it is only 1/2" inches thick. That 1" represents the better parts but then the 1/2 inch represents the hard drive. Slows the flow of water and limits the rest of the computers capabilities.



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Answer 3

Games - Most of the games just need a single or dual core cpu to run. Say you have a quad core clocked at 1.8Ghz or above with a mid or high end graphic card. And the game you are running needs just a single core to run. The cpu has to push the data to gpu. Here bottleneck comes in to play coz slow cpu. A higher clocked cpu would have done the job. It also depends on the game whether its cpu or gpu based. For example BF3 is a multi-core supported game. Modern strategy games benefits much from a quad or hexa core cpu and the gpu handles all the candy effects. Thanks to Intel and Amd for bringing Turbo boost and Turbo core technologies.

Answer 4

Finding bottlenecks can be hard but sometimes obvious. Heres an example if you have crossfired 6990's running on the system buy you only have an AMD Phenom X4 running at 2.5 ghz then you obviously have a bottleneck on your cpu. You will always have bottlenecks between cpus and gpus, but nothing that will horribly hamper performance if you pick the parts right.

Answer 5

bottle necking a systems graphics GPU is when you have a low end CPU and a High End High Dollar Graphics Card meaning you may have a 200-300 Card but can your Cpu Communicate with it fast enough to use it's potential also meaning if it cant your wasting money and to understand bottle necking fully it's a way of saying your not getting the best out of your PC like having a good Graphics card but low Cpu or having both good graphics and CPU and low Ram there are Different ways of bottle necking a system you want to maximize your bus speeds and get all you can out of your system meaning upgrade everything to its full potential to avoid problems with bottl necking bus speeds its like having Data on a 2 lane highway then it suddenly becomes one lane and it cant process the data fast enough because your bottle necking something or your PC Components are out dated all together hope this helps

Answer 6

Bottleneck is just pretty much what makes your CPU slower. In most PC the bottleneck is the HDD.

Answer 7

when there are alot of jobs to be processed exceeding the space avalable in the cpu