The latest AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs are the most viral things going around the internet these days, thus we are mostly hearing about their bottleneck capabilities. Hardware Unboxed, a YouTube channel stresses that its results only apply in CPU-heavy games like Horizon Zero Dawn, Watch Dogs: Legion, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where CPU performance affects framerates more so than in other triple-A titles.
The benchmarks were conducted only by using DX12, so here is the list of CPUs and GPUs that Hardware Unboxed used below.
CPU
- AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
- AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
- AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
- Intel Core i3-10100
GPU
- AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT
- AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
- AMD Radeon RX 6800
- AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
Hardware Unboxed found that the RX 5700 XT achieves higher minimum and average FPS with low-end CPUs than NVIDIA’s high-end GPUs do when CPU limited. An FPS gulf of between 20% and 30% was observed in some games, but the Turing cards perform unexpectedly poorly when CPU bound.
The difference between AMD and NVIDIA cards is stated because that NVIDIA’s driver requires more CPU cycles to function than AMD’s driver, which results in higher CPU utilization. The requirements of more cycle are not the problem for powerful CPUs but severely affects less powerful ones from both Intel and AMD.
So the bottleneck issues might change some people’s minds looking to buy new Graphics, but rest assured. The findings of Hardware Unboxed may only apply to those who are considering upgrading their GPU but still have a mid-range CPU that is a few generations old.