Today I stumbled across this site, which allows you to see whether your CPU and GPU are well paired, for various tasks.
E.g., here’s my current set up, for “graphics intensive tasks”:
And the site tells me this for that combination:
While the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X is well-equipped to manage strenuous computational tasks, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 limited graphical prowess may compromise the overall system efficiency. This disparity could lead to decreased performance and less effective utilization of system resources. To rectify this imbalance, an upgrade to a more capable graphics card that complements the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X processing abilities is advisable.
Neat!
(Standard disclaimers - I am not affiliated with the site and YMMV)
Thanks for the link! Definitely helpful.
Pretty interesting results for me - I’m actually genuinely surprised that my CPU is my bottleneck, because I’d been assuming it was my GPU. That said, I have no bottlenecking at all if I run only one monitor, according to this calculator, but when I run the calculator for three monitors (my typical set-up, though I often run four because my drawing tablet has a screen), apparently my CPU doesn’t have the power to keep up with the GPU.
The sites result are questionable. In games you are probably limited by your gpu. The best way to check this is to check the cpu and gpu utilisation.
Yeah, I think monitoring the actual utilisation on my PC is more useful than theoretical calculations. Games performance is pretty good (it’s not like I’m playing demanding 2023 releases), but I’ve definitely got a bottleneck in there on digital art, 3D modelling, etc, and I’m not convinced that the CPU is the issue there.