I may finally have a CPU bottleneck

So in today's stress test in Guild Wars 2, I wasn't doing anything other than testing my frame rates and differences between settings. I came to an interesting conclusion and I would like to see if you guys agree. I brought up a few monitoring programs real quick and snapped four screenshots of a random Asura Elementalist I was fooling around with in Metrica Province. The FPS is in the game in the options window in the lower right hand side, showing usually around 30-40FPS.

I didn't have time this morning to do any real benchmarks, so I just took these pictures. I think they represent most of what I experience in terms of frames (which are pretty bad since I had the settings up very high). I have three monitors and expected to have a GPU bottlenecking me 90% of the time, but I don't think that's entirely true now.

Here are the four pictures:






There are several things that I'm seeing here:
1) My FPS is mostly around 30-40FPS
2) My CPU is always hovering around 70% load, with one core (probably for logic in game) always being almost 100%.
3) My GPU load increases as the resolution goes up as expected. At the same time, in one instance my frames go down and in the other, my frames stay about the same.
4) I can tell that Guild Wars 2 is using my system to its fullest since both the CPU is always being stressed and the GPU's load scales very well. This rules out bad optimization for the most part.



I still think that my GPU's are bottlenecking at triple monitor resolutions for the most part, but I also think that the bottleneck varies to my CPU sometimes as well. There are several hints - first, my FPS with GPU load of ~40% is at 39, which is awful. Second, my FPS hardly goes down as I increase my resolution if at all sometimes. Third, the CPU always being maxed in one core means that it's trying to compute as fast as it can, pointing towards a CPU bottleneck.

My system specs are in my profile.

I've been wanting to upgrade my CPU to a 3770k, but never thought it was worth it since I never thought that my CPU was ever my bottleneck. This changes things though...

Anyway, I thought I would just share this with you to see what you think, it may also give you a good representation of the performance of the game now that it's been pretty well optimized.

This makes me want to make the switch even more. I originally got my Sabertooth AM3+ board when I was planning on getting Bulldozer, but when it came out I was so disappointed I didn't even want to try it. However, my Sabertooth board is phenomenal for only $180

I'm not huge into OCing, but I will do a descent one on IB. I'm thinking 4.2-4.5 is a good speed to stop at for what I do, maybe even keep it at stock until I get enough GPU performance to utilize the extra headroom.

As it seems like most people are getting really good frames with descent intel chips, I think my opinion of my CPU bottlenecking my system is pretty solid. Also, if they will be adding support for Xfire, then that will only emphasize the bottleneck.

It seems to me like I can fiddle with my graphics settings as much as I want, but my FPS hardly changes (maybe up to 10FPS max difference). WVW gets pretty laggy for me, so I'm pretty sure it's a CPU bottleneck. I'm disappointed with AMD chips recently, though I still think that their Phenom chips fit a much better bang/buck niche than Intel's i3.