Rewindlabs

So does anyone here have an article that explains this effect?

I hear it mentioned often that when you lower the video settings in a game by so much you are just off loading work/the game onto the CPU

Anyone care to explain exactly how this works...or a link..yeah a link?

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iamgiGGlz

If you lower the gfx settings, your card will be able to run the game a lot faster. If your CPU can't "keep up", then the game will run slowly anyway - bottleneck. With my fairly basic knowledge of AMD cpu's, I would say you might be getting that effect with your CPU at stock speeds. That particular 4870 is a gem.
That said, if you're running at 4.2Ghz, I think your CPU will "keep up" just fine.

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ChickenInferno

Just from personal experience and testing (alot of testing), higher resolution screens (1920x1080 and above) tend to be very CPU independant to the point that 2560x1600 30" monitors are almost completely CPU independant. The CPU dependancy of lower resolution screens causes the GPUs to not run at 100% capacity thus it is a CPU bottleneck.

You can verify this by dropping your CPU down to 1/2 speed of stock and (keeping all cores enabled), then run benchmark almost any game(some games seem to bypass the CPU bottlenecking effect) at 4 different resolutions (Same settings..so max out everything if you can). Then increase your CPU speed to stock and rerun all of the benchmarks. Overclock your CPU to where you have it now and rerun all of the benchmarks once again. You will see a very consistent increase in FPS at lower resolutions as the CPU speed increases. However at higher resolutions, you will see almost zero change in FPS.

I've done this before with different games like UT3, Crysis Warhead, HL2, and L4D and saw the pattern in every game. This is the reason that I like to tell people to upgrade their monitor when they have a slow CPU with a great GPU. Most of the time they see almost no drop in FPS at a higher resolution or even a slight increase depending on the CPU speed (celeron M's tend to show increases on higher resolutions because the CPU bottleneck at lower resolutions is so great).

Note that you can clearly see that a CPU overclock is still benefitial at my 1920x1200 Resolution and that the difference in the performance between 9x266 and 6x400 is mostly due to the FSB: DRAM ratio (the higher FSB made my DDR3 run in 1:2). On a 30" monitor, there would be almost no difference in Avg. FPS between CPU speeds.




Tests were done with my old system Q6600 at speeds shown, Corsair 4gb XMS3 1600mhz 9-9-9-24-2T, EVGa GTX 260 (Core 192) at 726 - 1458 - 1107, on my EVGa 790i FTW.

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gamervivek

There is no off-loading, it's a bloody misconception.
A CPU works on CPU things, the GPU works on GPU things, changing resolution doesn't change how they work or if they take up other's workload.
CPU processes data-->conveys information to GPU, GPU then processes the frame and displays it on the screen.The time taken in these steps depends on the resolution and the game settings.

It isn't synchronised, a CPU may process the data and relay it for a frame before the GPU is ready to process it.This is GPU bottlenecking since even if your CPU produced more information you won't get higher frames.

If the GPU processes a frame before the CPU is ready with the next frame data then you are CPU bottlenecked.This is CPU bottlenecking so you 1)increase the time a GPU needs to process a frame by increasing graphic settings, resolution 2)overclock the CPU so that it becomes GPU bottlenecked again.

You should always try to gain a GPU bottleneck with best visual experience with playable framerates, unless you are a counter strike junkie who wants >1000fps

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