Am I bottlenecking that hard? Help Wanted!!

Hey guys, I had just got back into PC gaming and decided to upgrade my video card of my old gaming rig. I ended up picking up the ZOTAC 1080TI AMP Extreme Edition. Let start by first mentioning I am still on 1080p with a 144hz monitor. I know the video card is overkill for 1080p gaming but thought it would help out the 144hz refresh rate until I decide to make the jump to 1440p or 4K. Anyway I started to play some games like Battlegrounds, Project Cars, Shadow of Mordor and Overwatch. I noticed I was not getting the frames I was expecting and was not correlating to the benchmarks I have seen online. I know my CPU is dated and my Ram as well but I didn't expect it to bottle neck this hard.

I performed a clean Windows 10 Pro 64bit install as well as have the latest drivers installed and even flashed my bios to the latest version.

These are the FPS I am getting in each game maxed all the way out:

1) Shadow of Mordor: 95-100fps constant. I turned no cap FPS on in settings and doesn't seem to want to go over 100 FPS. Also does not dip below 95 at any time. To me it seems capped and was wondering if I was doing something wrong.

2) Project Cars: With rain and other cars on the screen I am getting like 40-60FPS. Very disappointing.

3) Overwatch: 150-180fps. I have seen some streamers on twitch with a less powerful video card get 200+ FPS.

4) Battlegrounds: 50-80FPS Also thought this was very dissapointing.

These are my specs as follows:

CPU: i7 3820 @ 3.6ghz Sandy Bridge

Mobo: EVGA X79 FTW

RAM: 24GB DDR3

PSU: Corsair HX750

Monitor: Asus 1080p 144hz

I bought the video card from micro center so I have 30 days to exchange or return. Do you guys think the card is faulty? Should I exchange or return the card?

I just find it hard to believe CPU and RAM can give me a significant boost in FPS. For example I have seen some streamers get 200+ fps in Overwatch whereas I am only getting 150-180fps. Can a CPU and RAM increase the FPS by 50-100FPS?!?

I understand 1080p does not utilize the card but I would think if my card is more powerful than some other streamers I've viewed or even my friends that I should be getting better performance in the same games.

Am I missing something here? Any advise is appreciated, thank you!

You should see CPU and GPU utilization % with MSI Afterburner or a similar program. If GPU is at less then 100% most of the time then you have a bottleneck. You can check GPU clock speed and temperature as well to see if it throttles, but it's probably not that.

@PfizersaurusRex: I will try that when I get home. In Overwatch it shows your gpu usage and I do not believe it was anywhere close to 100%. I think it was around 20% if I am not mistaken. Are you saying there is nothing wrong with the card and that I am being bottlenecked from my CPU and ram?

Upgrading my CPU and RAM will increase my FPS by that much? This is based off the performance I have seen my friends and other streamers get on the same games listed above. It just doesn't make sense to me that the CPU and RAM will give me that much of a difference in performance compared to one of the top of the line video cards would provide.

I also tested WOW on everything max and when in a main city with nothing going on I am only seeing about 60 fps. How are my frames so low on such a powerful card even if I was bottlenecking. Also I find it hard to believe an I7 is such a huge bottleneck.

I appreciate the reply!

@thisguy123:You can test your GPU with Furmark, I think there is a benchmark there so you can see if it runs stable. I don't know about the exact fps you should have in those games, but it should be on par with stock 2600K. If you can overclock it over 4 GHz I'm sure you would see a performance boost.

That is crazy low fps. Are the settings maxed out in all of your games? I wonder if it could be CPU limited at 1080p My GPUs dont like my old 19" monitor

Is that a non K 3820?

Your problem is you are playing on 1080p resolution.

If your intention is to play at 144hz then you need a very fast cpu greatly overclocked along with your 1080 Ti to hit that mark. Your cpu will extremely limit your GPU otherwise. Example being 7700k overclocked @ 5 GHz

If you play on 4K though then you can have pretty much any quad core cpu and your GPU will still at around 100% capability most of the time.

In short, you need:

For 1080p 144hz or 1440p 144hz = Top end GPU + Top end CPU highly overclocked

For 4K = Top end GPU + any decent enough quad core CPU.

@howmakewood: yes, non K

Shame the sandy bridge chips are amazing at OC due to better thermals than later consumer chips

You already know theres a bottleneck, that cpu was around back in the gtx 680 days. Its several generations behind gpus, and the fact that its not overclocked makes it even more dated.

Take the 1080ti back for a 1070gtx unless you are going to upgrade the cpu soon. Even a 1070 is overkill for 1080p, but it leaves room for newer games in the future or if you get a high hz monitor.

It's X99, he should be able to OC it.

It might me seeing things but I have power management mode to optimal power on my 1080gtx. This seems better then other 2 options in control panel. You should try that and see if it changes.

@PfizersaurusRex: oh you're right, forgot it was e-series one

I think you are right. I also recommend you that. Can you tell me Which Gaming Monitor you used to play games?

@thisguy123: I bought my gtx 1070 not long ago and my cpu was a amd fx6300 with 8gigs of ram turns out i had major bootleneck like battleground going under 60fps all the time so I bought a nee ryzen 5 cpu and 16gigs of ddr4 ram and my fps his now almost double

You're certainly bottlenecking. The card is something like five or six times more powerful than flagship model of your CPU's manufacturing date. The 1080 Ti is almost always "bottlenecked" at 1080p as it's memory performance is really meant for high resolution gaming. Core might be 100% utilized but doubtful you are stressing the bus and VRAM, so you're leaving power on the table.

As long as the core is at 100%, then it is not bottlenecked. All the other architecture is only supporting the core. So, the card may not be fully stressed, but it is delivering the performance that the application is asking of it. At 100% core usage, the GPU itself has now become the bottleneck.

@BassMan: That's not true. GPU core clocks aren't the end all for GPU performance. You can get more frames by reducing core clocks (for stability) and increasing memory speed. Edit: Misread your comment. This is semantics. I wasn't referring to a 100% GPU usage not being a bottleneck I was referring to performance scaling across applications. At 4K the performance is not 1/4 that of 1080p because of memory utilization and architectural improvements like delta compression. The point is that it's "improperly" using the card. I don't think he ever stated what his usage is but I really doubt it's 100%.

Terrible cpu bottleneck. PUBG on ultra i'm getting between 80-110 fps on a gtx 1080. Dropping shadows and foliage and maybe post processing down a bit and get 120-150fps a lot of the time.