It’s time to stop ignoring the CPU in your gaming PC

This story is part of Jacob Roach's ReSpec series, covering the world of PC gaming and hardware. There’s one thing that will strike fear into the heart of any PC gamer: a CPU bottleneck. It’s unimaginable that you wouldn’t get the full power of your GPU when playing games, which is often the most expensive component in your rig. And although knowledge of what CPU bottlenecks are and how to avoid them is common, we’re in a new era of bottlenecks in 2024.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming Check your inbox! Privacy Policy The solution is to increase the load on your GPU. Running at higher graphics settings or playing at a higher resolution means your GPU will take longer to render each frame, and in most cases, that means it won’t be waiting on your CPU for more work. You can see that in action in Cyberpunk 2077 below.

The idea behind a CPU bottleneck is the same as it has always been, but the practical application can get messy quickly. With modern games, you’re often not rendering the game at your output resolution, and you have to contend with large, open worlds that put a lot more strain on your processor. Taking the decades-old lessons of CPU bottlenecks and applying them to modern games doesn’t hold up.

It’s not just Spider-Man Miles Morales, either. In Cyberpunk 2077, if we flip on the Ultra RT preset and enable DLSS to Performance mode — a way you might actually play the game — there’s a performance gap of around 26% at both 1080p and 1440p. That disappears at 4K, but the difference compared to native resolution is staggering.

From 1080p up to 4K, the Ryzen 9 7950X is around 25% faster than the Ryzen 5 7600X. In this situation, we’re completely constrained by the CPU all the way up to 4K with the most demanding graphics settings the game is capable of. If that doesn’t convince you that your CPU is important for gaming performance, I’m not sure what will.

Thinking about bottlenecks this way is helpful for identifying them within your own system, and my full results above show why. In Spider-Man Miles Morales with DLSS on, you can see that the Ryzen 5 7600X is only capable of about 85 frames per second , while the Ryzen 9 7950X is capable of about 105 fps. And we can confidently tie the performance to those parts because there’s virtually no change in performance from 1080p up to 4K.

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