Bottlenecking questions

[Sashatheman]

i was reading about people saying that thier CPU and motherboards bottle necks their graphics cards. i was wodnering if theres a way to know if sometihng on your PC is being bottle necked?

 

[gaara]

There isn't really a method to test if your system has a bottleneck, it really just comes to common sense

Say, putting a 7800GTX with a Celeron or using DDR266 with an AMD64 would be examples of a bottleneck

 

[Sashatheman]

ok thanks.

would u say , having 3.0Ghz intel cpu garantees that any video card wont be bottle necked

 

[Flanker]

Nope. It WILL bottleneck the 7800GTX, and maybe the 6800 series. I think you'll be fine with the 6800s though.

 

[uzi9mm]

A 3ghz p4 bottlenecking a 6800?

Plz..

 

[Nubius]

nothing really bottlenecks a graphics card in the first place...it's not like CPU and memory which communicate to each other...yeah having a better system would result in better scores in games and benchmarks, but it's not because it's 'bottlenecking' the graphics card...it's simply weak at the instructions you're giving it assuming you're using a crappy celeron or duron and wanting to do intensive game play

 

[DoomUK]

Yup, a graphics card bottleneck is generally more a figure of speech than anything else, it's implying that the CPU can't keep up with what it should be handling (running the AI, calculating physics, keeping track of all the objects/models/geometry in the world etc).

 

[Flanker]

A 3ghz p4 bottlenecking a 6800?

Plz..

I think you'll be fine with the 6800s though.

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Yup, a graphics card bottleneck is generally more a figure of speech than anything else, it's implying that the CPU can't keep up with what it should be handling (running the AI, calculating physics, keeping track of all the objects/models/geometry in the world etc).

I understand what you and Nubius are saying, but essentially, that is a bottleneck right there isn't it?

Its like having a 200ml bottle. It has a capacity to fill up to 200ml, but you only have 150ml of water that you can put into it, therefore, you get no more than 150ml. If you bought a bottle with a capacity of 150ml, you would save money as well as not have any space left over (not lose any performance going to a weaker video card).

Its not exactly a bottleneck, but it serves the same purpose.

 

[uzi9mm]

Because you said that a 3ghz "MAYBE" could support a 6800 without a bottleneck. That is what prompted me to say what I said......

 

[DoomUK]

Take a look @ some benchmarks. It's the video card(s) that make most of the performance difference in games, generally speaking. And the CPU's in-game purpose could be becoming less and less it seems...

In correction to my previous statement, modern GPU's also handle much of the geometry calculations, hence why we have Vertex pipelining artichitecture; a vertex defining a point in 3D space (X,Y,Z) in relation to the origin.

Also, on the horizon we have the Physics Processing Unit, or PPU. This will offload calculations such as collision detection, gravity, moveable/destructable objects etc that is a CPU hog right now, especially in physics-heavy games like HL2. Take a look @ these tech demos which give an example of what can be accomplished with the PPU: http://www.airtightgames.com/currentproject.html.

Honestly, it won't be long before we have dedicated AI processors...