Your Gaming PC Is BOTTLENECKED! - Here's How To Fix It!

a portion of this video is sponsored by brilliant don't buy that super you'll it'll be Arabia you've probably noticed that PC gaming videos on YouTube tend to have a comment section that sounds something like that and let's be honest is not really that useful but PC bottlenecking is a real thing and it's important to understand what it is but ultimately what is it is it something you should care about and does it matter well in this video we're going to explain everything all wrapped up neatly for you with a little bow so you know exactly what bottlenecks are how to avoid them and ultimately how to get the best PC gaming experience possible and I'm afraid it all starts with a little bit of bad news because your gaming PC that you might be watching this on right now the one that's on your desk that you spent hundreds if not thousands of pounds on already has a bottleneck it should go without saying that when we're running a game we want to achieve the highest frame rate possible whether that's the average or the one percent lows and the most common way to improve your FPS is of course to upgrade your graphics card or the GPU in our system so you go out you grab your wallet you swap out that five-year-old video cards and you replace it with something shiny and you and yes the odds are indeed in your favor that you'll see a massive increase to your frame rates this is because for most PC Gamers the bottleneck is the graphics card and you're going to be what's known as GPU bounce but this isn't the case for everybody hold on sorry this was not planned I need to go to the fridge and we will grab some London Essex original tonic water because apparently I'm a fancy geyser most of your components are here they're able to work at full capacity then this bit at the end is the bit that restricts the FPS that you can get thus it's bottlenecks but this has been the fridge for about a year foreign ly still fizzy hmm one of the number one things I always get asked on this channel is why your gaming PC isn't working properly because you've looked at your statistics and you've seen that your graphics card is only running at 72 power or your CPU utilization is only 13 and don't worry we will explain a little bit more about what these mean a little bit later in the video but these figures aren't actually wrong it's just showing you which components aren't able to properly run flat out there are so many different parts to a gaming PC and theoretically any of them could be the thing that's holding you back but typically these are the most common the one that we've already touched on graphics card bottlenecks typically for visual and demanding scenes retracing effects and increases in resolution negative effects of these bottlenecks are usually quite limited this is almost the one that you want providing you have enough capability for a smooth frame rate in the first place Graphics memory bottlenecks definitely a trending topic right now with newer games requiring a lot of it draw distance texture quality anti-aliasing and resolution and the main settings that each it up with eight gigabytes 12 and 16 the current standards for a good experience at 1080p 1440 and 4K respectively though 8 gigabytes is quickly running out of steam negative effects include missing textures obvious pop-in extremely low FPS and sudden and dramatic stuttering and hitching avoid at all costs Ram capacity bottlenecks are less frequent but still fairly common bottleneck they can affect games that like a lot of memory it's mainly going to affect those with 8 gigabytes of RAM or anyone that wants to stack loads of applications open whilst gaming negative effects are similar to that of GPU memory with the main problem being stuttering or a lower FPS value it is also worth noting that you can also get a bottleneck from your RAM speed but this is a bit more complicated because it usually shows up as a CPU bottleneck not to confuse matters in a nutshell your processor or the CPU can often work faster with quicker Ram which in turn increases your cpu's output I've actually already made a video all about this when loads of fancy graphs loads of explainers you can find this from the top round corner of your screen but tldr make sure your RAM is running at the fastest possible speed that is rated for and that leads us on nicely to what is becoming an increasively common bottleneck the CPU bound scenario or being CPU or processor limited and this is very much game dependent because some games are very heavy on the processor if it's got a lot of logic going on something like Warzone for instance it's you've got so many different characters it's got to work out what everything is where it's going a lot has to go through this and in some games so you'll find that this is what's holding you back and the common traits if you like of being CPU bound are usually just a lower FPS value maybe one that has a lot of variants or sudden stuttering in certain areas of the game when a lot is going on all at the same time I'm sure some people would disagree with me on the naming of this but there's also a bit more of an unknown one the power supply bottleneck this only shows its ugly head and very specific scenarios many being the most intense games when running with an overclock to your CPU GPU or both the negative effects of this are pretty obvious as you say game crashes or you see what I did there if you're a PC Gamer on a laptop then you could just see low levels of FPS and usually this can be solved by connecting to AC power or activating one of the game modes within your laptop settings now I've only ever seen this once but technically speaking a storage bottleneck is also a possibility especially with Microsoft direct storage right around the corner this is caused when your drive just isn't fast enough to stream assets to your graphics memory and again can cause stutters and hitching or extremely low FPS if all goes down the pan there is also one more bottleneck to report and I'm pleased to say this one isn't your fault hooray this is what I like to call the game engine bottleneck and in certain games many older ones there can be hard caps on FPS Apex Legends and there's also just games that don't use Hardware properly I mean something like Smite for instance it's dx9 and I tried running this on like a high-end PC the other day it was barely using anything we still had Sky High FPS but we weren't able to utilize all of our Hardware it's worth remembering that different in-game settings will have different strains and stresses on different components in your system so while upping the resolution might put more stress on your graphics card it usually has little to no effect on your CPU high quality PC games will tell you all of this as you scroll through all the different settings so have a play into you at the right balance but what exactly is a good balance and how do I know which component it is that's bottleneck in my system I need to know well let me explain right after a short word from this video sponsor chances are if you're watching this video then you're a massive fan of computers but have you ever wondered about how they actually work well the good news is it is never too late to start learning and there's a free and easy way to achieve this with a sponsor of today's video brilliant brilliant is an incredible online learning tool that helps you learn math computer science and data science interactively regardless of your age career or interests brilliant can help you to explore your curiosity do not only pick up new skills but also to learn more about the world and how it works not only does brilliant explain things in a clear and concise manner with diagrams and interactive representations but when you get something wrong it really helps you to understand how to get it right next time for instance I'm absolutely fascinated with space having just got back from the Kennedy Space Center and all it seems I want to do now is learn more about it and Brilliant actually has loads of courses to help you understand the math and physic principles used to get us to the moon and back I've actually just completed the special beyond the nutshell course that's all about black holes learning what they are how they form and even the mathematics to calculate event Horizons brilliant add new courses every month from beginner all the way up to Advanced and best of all you can get started today for free simply hit my link down in the description below for a 30-day free trial and 20 off an annual plan right okay then let's find bottleneck there are various tools you can use to find this with the most simple being baked in benchmarks for the games that you actually already own shadow the Tomb Raider is probably the most popular one out there as it will give you a detailed breakdown and graph analysis of both the GPU and the CPU so you can see exactly which component is limiting you and where but there are loads of different games to choose from including maternal Far Cry and loads others they do work and they certainly do the trick but they do leave yourself with a little bit of a problem they only tell you the story in those games and I don't think people are playing Shadow the Tomb Raider for a thousand hours a year shut up and let's face it games are so varied these days that some are going to be incredibly GPU bound with things like Apex Legends or cyberpunk 2077 whilst others like Warzone 2 and Planet zoo can be brick walled by not having the best CPU money can buy the way to test your PC then is to analyze it in real time with some benchmarking tools the one that I personally love to use is called MSI afterburner as this Taps into a real-time statistics engine that can be customized to show you as many or as few components as you like to say it's a little bit fiddly though would be a bit of an understatement as the overlay isn't actually on by default so ensure this is turned on and then let you check your CPU GPU memory whatever it is you want to see because again these aren't on by default once you have got everything set up and working though you'll see a live text reader at the top of your screen they'll detail exactly how much your Hardware is being used at any given time it's unlikely to ever say 100 but if your GPU is sitting at around about 97 then you know your graphics card is the bottleneck in this particular a game at this resolution and with these settings and this bit is really important because you can't just run one 60 second test in one game and then blanket your entire game Library by saying oh I'm CPU limited and then upgrading your CPU and expecting everything to change ultimately if you want to know what's holding you back it is always going to be limited to those particular tests but in order to get an average and a good idea of your system as a whole you are going to have to do multiple tests in multiple games if your GPU utilization isn't sitting at 97 and it's regularly going well below this then you know that something else is likely causing your bottleneck and nine out of 10 times this will be your CPU but unfortunately it's not always that easy to know as your CPU utilization will often be way way lower often sitting between 10 and 20 load and this is the bit that always catches people out because they think if you're CPU bound then your CPU should be using a hundred percent load but when you think about it if a game is only using four six maybe eight cores and you got something like this that has 24 clearly it's not going to be running at 100 load because then you'd be using all of them you can actually get a much better idea of the actual stress by looking at the per core usage rather than an overall average and seeing how close to 100 these numbers get but again it's not going to be exactly 100 you're just looking for high values on the CPU and lower values on the GPU if neither the CPU or the GPU are maxed out then have a look at your vram or memory usage and see if these are close to Max as again anything on the high side can suggest some limiting factors the main reason that all of this gets so complicated though is because your gaming PC probably has multiple bottlenecks in different games but in some instances it can be multiple bottlenecks within the same game maybe at the start of the game it's the graphics card that's running at 100 but then you have a load of effects going on and it causes the CPU to then become the limiting factor maybe it's scene by scene maybe it's multiple times in the same scene it can get quite confusing but but the only real cure for this is to have what we call a balanced system in short all this really means is that all of the components in your system pair well together without having one component that's really strong or one that's just a big fat letdown this means having a gaming PC with at least 16 gigabytes of system Ram a graphics card that's capable of playing the games that you want to play at the settings and resolutions that you desire then having a CPU that is capable of keeping up with it without overpaying for the privilege this is of course easier said than done but generally you want to have a ryzen 5 or Intel Core i5 for low to mid-tier gaming and then an i7 or ryzen 7 for the high end and I'll tell you now I have built so many gaming PCs on the channel I mean I'm literally tripping over them as I'm filming this video all with the sort of aim to help you discover the best builds at different sorts of price points and if there are problems with them not being balanced that's what we explain in the video and we get to see firsthand why so if you do want to learn a little bit more about a balanced system or maybe you're looking to upgrade or build yourself a brand new gaming PC check out the playlist at the end of this video that goes through literally everything you could think of when it comes to gaming PC oh and if you're lazy or you just don't have time I'll leave some of the best combinations down below with my Amazon affiliate links so yeah your gaming PC has a bottleneck they all do and that's okay it only really matters if you want to upgrade your system or you're looking to optimize your in-game settings to maximize visuals or FPS the important thing is to know what your bottlenecks are and then that way the upgrade or optimization path is easy and not a stab in the dark so the question goes out to you on this one what is the bottleneck in your system what upgrades are you looking to make or maybe are you not going to make any because graphics card prices or something in particular let us know down in the comment section below we would genuinely love to hear from you smash the like button if it's been useful get yourself subscribed and if you do want to check out current pricing on anything featured in this video you can find it listed down below my Amazon affiliate links so thank you so much for watching I really hope you've enjoyed it catch you in the next one [Music]

Channel: PC Centric

Views: 39,288

Keywords: pccentric, gaming, pc gaming, gaming computer, pc centric, pc build, gaming pc, gaming pc bottleneck, pc bottleneck, gpu bottleneck, cpu bottleneck, pc build guide, gaming pc build, rtx 4090, rtx 4060, amd, nvidia, intel, ryzen, best pc build, best gaming pc, pc centric build guide, gaming computer build

Id: IgXKHsjkbUM

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 22 2023