How to Determine Which Component Is Bottlenecking a Gaming PC

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While you can make educated guesses and ask online on message boards, the truth is, your bottleneck may vary between games or applications. For this reason, advice regarding which component to upgrade may not be valid for you. For example, MMORPGs tend to tax the CPU much more heavily than other games.

This guide should prove helpful for determining which component is the bottleneck for each individual game.

How to Know Which Component is Bottlenecking Your Gaming PC | Delidded Tech

If the above guide is too difficult for you, if you name the games you play, your system specs, and your budget for upgrading, I personally can recommend what to upgrade. But I strongly recommend doing the steps in the guide, as they can determine our exact bottleneck for each game.

 

[PP Mguire]

That's what I'm here for on these boards, not to mention it's slightly rude for a newcomer to start linking their own sites on other boards.

To make at least a slight amendment to that, just because VRAM is at 90% or higher doesn't really mean much. Some games are meant to load up your VRAM with texture information like a cache even if it doesn't need a texture for that particular scene. Other games like to store as much information the game will allow equalling to that of the same amount or double your system RAM like Blops 3. Another point is, there are actually only a few games that take advantage of an SSD. So while it's nice to have a nice big SSD for your Steam library only certain games actually take advantage of it. Most games that are console ports (which face it, are most) are purposely limited to that of an optical drive because the engine is designed around the slow 5400RPM speed of the HDD or loading off a disc. On some games on the actual loading screen I've seen a 10MB/s cap when there's 1400MB/s left worth of sequential reads left on my SSD. To the CPU I already have my own article I wrote back in 2012 which sadly is quite relevant still to this day. In regards to that, most quads from 2009 up and duals from 2012 up (Intel) will handle practically any game fine thus making the GPU the bottleneck most of the time.