CPU Bottleneck? GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Tested on AMD Ryzen versus Intel Kaby Lake
Thief and GTAV
Thief
Thief is a series of stealth video games in which the player takes the role of Garrett, a master thief in a fantasy/steampunk world resembling a cross between the Late Middle Ages and the Victorian era, with more advanced technologies interspersed. Thief is the fourth title in the Thief series, developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix on February 25, 2014.
This is an older game title, but we wanted to see how an older game title would perform on the latest processors and video cards.
We ran Thief with the image quality settings set at normal with VSYNC disabled.
Benchmark Results: In Thief we found that the move from the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 FE to the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FE didn’t yield huge performance gains as this is an older game title with averages already well into the 100+ FPS range at most all resolutions. We did see some nice scaling at every resolution on both processors on this game title. The Intel Core i7-7700K processor as we got 21% gains at 4K, 7% gains at 1440P and 4% gains at 1080P. The AMD Ryzen 7 1700 processor powered platform gained 17% at 4K, 7% at 1440P and 3% at 1080P.
Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto V, currently one of the hottest PC games, was finally released for the PC on April 14, 2015. Developed by Rockstar, it is set in 2013 and the city of Los Santos. It utilizes the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) which Rockstar has been using since 2006, with multiple updates for technology improvements.
In Grand Theft Auto V we set the game to run with no MSAA with 16x AF and high image quality settings as we didn’t want the GPU to bottleneck the system too bad, but wanted a setup that your average gamer would actually play on. We used the games built-in benchmark utility to have at least one game we used that could be compared to your setup at home. We averaged all the five of the default benchmark runs and omitted both the minimum and maximum values as those results are garbage due to major inconsistencies.
Benchmark Results: In Grand Theft Auto V we got some very interesting results when we moved from the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 FE to the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FE. On the Intel Core i7-7700K processor we got 23% gains at 4K, 9% gains at 1440P and 2% gains at 1080P and on the AMD Ryzen 7 1700 processor we got 24% at 4K, 1% at 1440P and basically no improvement at 1080P. This is yet another game title that shows the new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and even the GeForce GTX 1080 can be bottlenecked to some degree by the processor. In fact, it looks like we are actually CPU-bound or CPU-limited at both 1080P and now even 1440P with the Ryzen 7 series processor. The Intel Core i7-7700K doesn’t appear to have any major CPU limitations at 1440P or at least very minor.