but the maximum performance of a videocard can easily be said to be a bottleneck. Maybe not to a processor directly, but a bottleneck nonetheless.
It's "restricting a game from playing maxed settings" perhaps, but that's not a bottleneck in terms of a system bottleneck. Technically.....even if you could max everything out, and I mean COMPLETELY maxed out on whatever the most intensive game out there is, you can always go further, for infinity......maybe this card will max out the game doing 100FPS, the other one can do 200FPS, etc..etc... it'd be never ending, so no I would not consider that a bottleneck.
My 7800gt is bottlenecked by my AMD 64 3000. If I increased the CPU speed then it would be quite a bit higher.
No it's not......they don't directly communicate, therefore it's not bottlenecking the card. "But if I had a better CPU my games FPS would be higher", well yeah, but that applies to anything. If they don't directly communicate with one another, then they can't possible bottleneck one or the other.
Your cards ability isn't being capped by your processor, the overall systems ability can only reach a certain point because of your processor, but that's because the CPU and GPU are doing two different things, not working together on the same thing. Your cards ability is the same regardless of the processor.
In the socket A days if you had a 400FSB CPU and only PC2100 RAM, then your CPU's abilities would be capped because of the RAM.....no such thing is happening between your card and CPU.