I upgraded from a Ryzen 7 5800X with 32GB of DDR4-3200 to an Intel Core Ultra 5 250K with 32GB of DDR5-6400. However, in Crimson Desert, Cyberpunk 2077, and Battlefield 6, I'm seeing essentially the same FPS range as before. My graphics card is still an RTX 4070 Super, along with a Kingston 1TB NVMe drive, a Gigabyte B860 motherboard, and an MSI MAG 750W power supply. I'm gaming at 1440p. What could be limiting performance, and why didn't the new CPU and memory make a noticeable difference?
5 Answers
The RTX 4070 Super is probably still the limiting component. At 1440p, especially with medium or high graphics settings, those games put much more pressure on the GPU than the CPU. Replacing the processor won’t increase FPS much if the GPU was already running close to 100%.
Only if the CPU was actually limiting the frame rate. If the GPU was already the limiting factor, a faster CPU simply leaves the same GPU bottleneck in place.
The two processors aren’t going to produce dramatically different results in every 1440p game when paired with the same 4070 Super. You may have made more of a platform upgrade or future-proofing move than an immediate gaming-FPS upgrade. Try a CPU-heavy title or lower the resolution and graphics settings to see whether the new processor creates more headroom.
Check GPU usage, CPU usage, frame times, and temperatures while playing. If the GPU is consistently near 95–100% utilization, the result is expected. A faster CPU and faster memory mainly help in CPU-limited situations, such as simulation games, large strategy battles, competitive games at very high frame rates, or settings designed to minimize GPU load.
If your goal is a significantly higher average FPS across these games, the next meaningful upgrade would generally be the graphics card. That said, the 4070 Super is still a strong 1440p card, so keeping it and enjoying the new platform is perfectly reasonable unless you need a higher refresh-rate target.
The memory capacity stayed at 32GB, so the main change was bandwidth and latency. DDR5-6400 can be much faster on paper, but RAM upgrades usually offer only a small gaming improvement unless the previous memory was clearly holding the system back. Also compare the actual CAS latency, since DDR4-3200 with tight timings can be closer to DDR5 than the advertised speeds suggest.
I’m confused—if the old CPU was the bottleneck before, shouldn’t removing that bottleneck have increased performance?