I set up my gaming rig about four years ago, and it feels like the parts are starting to show their age. Recently, I upgraded to an RTX 5070, but I'm facing issues with frame drops, even though the Nvidia overlay indicates my GPU is running at around 50% and my CPU at 20%. It gets weirder because when I check Task Manager, it shows the CPU under steady use at 20%, but the utilization graph spikes to 100% during stutters in-game. My CPU is an Intel i9 10900k, and I'm wondering if it's bottlenecking my GPU. If that's the case, would upgrading the CPU solve my problem, or could other parts of my setup be causing issues too? I have an MSI MPG Z490 Gaming Edge motherboard and 64GB of DDR4 Trident Royal RAM.
2 Answers
Many games don't utilize all 10 cores of your CPU, so it's better to monitor individual core usage instead of just the overall CPU percentage. Also, make sure to check your CPU's temperature and clock speed. To get more detailed insights, use HWInfo64 or MSI Afterburner over Task Manager.
A solid indicator of a CPU bottleneck is when your GPU usage stays below 90%. Since it's normal for the GPU to be the limiting factor, ideally, it should be at 100%. Think of it like a conveyor belt: the CPU feeds frames to the GPU. If the CPU struggles to deliver, the GPU ends up waiting, causing those stutters. If you're often seeing the GPU under 60%, it likely points to a CPU bottleneck.
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