how do you decide what's actually holding your system back?

hmmm this is a good thread lol when u say high refresh, what frame rate are u actually aiming for in the shooters? matching teh monitor, or just staying above a ceratin floor? fingers crossed 🤞

lol same thing happened to me id like to stay near teh monitors refrseh rate in shooters 😂 GPU usage there sits noticeably below full load in busy fights, and one CPU core is pegged most of the time.

let us know how it goes.

been there man for competitive shooters at high refresh, the CPU often matters more than ppl expect cuz youre asking for a lot of frames, and every frame needs game logic and draw calls prepared. Lowering graphics settings shifts load off the GPU but doesnt reduce that per-frame CPU work much.

for slower, vsiually heavy single-player games at 1440p, teh GPU usually becomes the limit first. so teh hnoest answer is "depends which half of your library u care about more."

been there man going with the CPU (and the board that comes with it). The tests made it pretty clear that the games I care about most weren't limited by the graphics card. The GPU can wait for next year.

Good luck! good luck man!

wait what ah, i went through something similar. @cyruss128 counterpoint to the CPU-first crowd: if the CPU upgrade forces a whole new platform, a GPU upgrade plus slightly lower settings in teh shooters might give you a better overall experience across everything you play. "Bottleneck" isnt always the only factor; sometimes its where the money does teh most good.

ok so happy to help with this one 🤦 The simplest test i know: drop the resolution (or set the render scale low) and see what happens to your frame rate.

• If FPS jumps alot, teh GPU was the limit at your normal settings.
• If FPS barely moves, the CPU (or the game engine itself) is the ceiling, and a faster GPU wont help much in that game.

Do it in the games u actually play, in a busy scene, not the menu. Results can be completely different between a shooter and a strategy game. worked for me anyway 🤷

tbh the "resolution drop" trick is solid but if u want to be super scientific about it, u should try checking the actual frame time graphs in a tool like Cap# or even just a basic overlay. sometimes average FPS lies to u cuz of micro-stutters.

if u see the frame times (ms) staying flat even when the GPU usage is low, that's your CPU screaming for help. but also, keep an eye on your RAM speed and latency!! ppl always forget that a slow memory sub can bottleneck a high-end cpu just as easily as a weak chip can a gpu. in a setup like mine, i noticed that jumping to a faster cpu didn't do squat until i actually addressed the memory timings.

also, for those strategy games u mentioned, check if they are thread-heavy. some older engines are basically just a single-core nightmare, so no amount of 16-core monsters will fix it lol. just a heads up before u drop a ton of cash on a new platform!!