I built my PC back in 2019. I am still using the same CPU : i7 8700k. I have upgraded my GPU to an rtx 3070. I play only GPU heavy games in 4k usually with DLSS. I’m able to run most games in an acceptable framerate, 50-60fps. I would say my frame times could be better tho. I dont run any CPU heavy applications, but i have noticed that with these latest AAA games it takes forever to compile the shaders. My CPU is pretty outdated at this point, and I’m wondering if it would even be worth upgrading considering my use case and that I am mostly happy with my gaming performance. Oh and I run Linux if that makes a difference.
https://pc-builds.com/bottleneck-calculator/result/0NY175/1/general-tasks/3840x2160/
Effectively no gain, it’s a pretty balanced system so if you upgrade one then the other is gonna be bottlenecked.
I didn’t even know this site existed. This is really helpful, thanks!
Check how much CPU is being used during normal activities (task manager, process explorer whatever). If individual cores visit 100% usage briefly, that’s perfectly fine. If all cores go 100% for a while, that’s probably fine as well. If you see that the entire CPU maxes out for long periods of time, that could be a bottle neck. If you see that sort of thing happening when doing something exotic, that’s perfectly fine. You don’t need to upgrade your CPU just so that some once-a-year thing runs better. If you see that every day, you might want to consider upgrading.
BTW you can also use the same method to figure out if your GPU, RAM or disk is a bottleneck.
I use mangohud overlay and while I don’t track each CPU core, I track the overall percentage and it hardly over 60% while gaming.
That means your CPU should be just fine, though single thread performance could still be an issue.
If the overlay can’t show you all the cores separately, you would need to alt+tab to check the proper CPU graph from time to time. If single thread performance is a bottle neck, you should see a single core staying at 100% for a long period of time or multiple cores taking turns to briefly visit 100% load.