People often misunderstand the term "bottlenecks," but that's mainly due to the misinformation they tend to find on the internet. This leads to them overcomplicating things and spending money on the wrong hardware. If you browse some Reddit threads, you'll see people constantly arguing about CPU and GPU bottlenecks, and while some of them are right, you'll also notice many pointing out that it's the worst thing that can happen to a PC.

A bottleneck doesn't mean your PC isn't capable. You could have the fastest CPU in the market paired with the fastest GPU you can buy and still experience some bottlenecks in certain scenarios — like gaming at a lower resolution. So, let's discuss some myths about CPU and GPU bottlenecking and clear the confusion.

5 Your CPU is the main culprit

Other components, like your RAM and GPU, can hold your PC back

People often recommend upgrading the CPU when encountering a PC bottleneck, but that shouldn't be the sole focus. Sure, a weak CPU will hold back a powerful GPU, but you shouldn't overlook the fact that a low-end or outdated graphics card can bottleneck a powerful CPU too. For instance, when you play a graphically demanding game like Black Myth: Wukong on a PC with a Ryzen 9800X3D and RTX 3050, the performance isn't going to be great at higher resolutions. People don't use the term "GPU bottlenecking" for this scenario, but that's what it is. In this case, playing the game at 1080p resolution and lower graphical settings will minimize the bottleneck.

Likewise, when you don't have enough RAM to run a game optimally, your PC will use the virtual memory on your SSD, which can often cause slowdowns. Slow RAM speeds can also bottleneck data transfer between the CPU and system memory. This is why we highly recommend enabling the XMP or EXPO profile if your RAM supports it. Lastly, if you install a GPU that supports PCIe 4.0 or higher speeds in a motherboard with PCIe 3.0 lanes, its performance will take a hit.

4 You have to purchase better hardware

Often, some settings tweaks can minimize the bottleneck

People always suggest buying a faster CPU, faster RAM, or a more powerful GPU to fix a PC bottleneck, but you don't really have to make an expensive purchase. There are ways around bottlenecks, and it mostly involves tweaking some graphics settings. For instance, if your CPU is maxed out at 100% usage, you can try to reduce the load by lowering visual settings like draw distance, population density, and physics quality. Alternatively, you can minimize the background apps running on your PC or cap your frame rate to 60FPS.

Similarly, if you have a lower-end GPU, you can enable upscaling features like Nvidia DLSS or FSR to boost your frame rate. You can also turn off ray tracing and set shadow and texture quality settings to low to squeeze out even more performance. Additionally, if you have a modern graphics card that supports frame generation, you can enable it to alleviate CPU and GPU bottlenecks.

3 High CPU usage always indicates a bottleneck

Some games are just CPU-intensive by design

Many people start worrying when their CPU usage gets close to 100% while gaming, but some game genres, like strategy, MMORPGs, simulation, and open-world games, are CPU-intensive by design. For instance, MMORPGs rely heavily on the CPU for handling player interactions, whereas open-world games require the CPU to stream large assets and handle NPC behavior. Often, at least in these games, high CPU usage likely indicates that you're getting maximum performance from your PC. However, it's also possible that some background apps are actively using CPU resources too.

All in all, high CPU load should only be a concern when you see your GPU usage sitting below 80% while monitoring your hardware using a tool like MSI Afterburner. In these scenarios, you're likely to encounter frame drops and stuttering.

2 Bottleneck calculators are accurate

They often get it wrong and create more confusion

Let's make this clear: bottleneck calculators are not reliable. In fact, we don't recommend using PC bottleneck calculators at all because they usually give misleading results that create more confusion and lead to impulsive purchases. They prompt you to enter your PC specs to give a vague result, but you should take it with a huge grain of salt.

For starters, bottlenecking varies from game to game, and these tools disregard that aspect. For instance, a PC with a Ryzen 7800X and RTX 4090 would work just fine in a GPU-intensive game like Cyberpunk 2077, whereas you may experience a CPU bottleneck in Valorant. Also, they don't consider the refresh rate of your display. At higher refresh rates, games tend to be more demanding on the CPU, especially when your GPU can render frames faster. More importantly, they give a percentage estimate of a bottleneck when, in reality, there's no standard way to measure PC bottlenecks.

1 A CPU with more cores can fix bottlenecks

Your CPU's clock speed matters more than its core count

Your CPU's core count only matters up to a certain point because even some of the most demanding games utilize around 6-8 cores. Therefore, if you have an 8-core CPU, you can stop thinking that upgrading to more CPU cores will help improve your gaming performance. Most games and mainstream software prioritize single-threaded performance over raw core count, meaning the performance of each core matters more.

For instance, a Ryzen 9 7950X has 16 cores, but it consistently lags behind the 8-core Ryzen 9 7800X3D in the gaming department. That's because the latter has better single-core performance and a larger L3 cache. The IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) of a CPU matters just as much; newer CPUs have higher IPCs, meaning they can do more work at the same clock speed compared to older ones.

Bottlenecks don't render your PC useless

Just because you're experiencing a CPU or GPU bottleneck doesn't mean you should splurge on new hardware. In most cases, that extra 10-15% performance uplift you get isn't worth the full price of a new CPU and motherboard. A PC bottleneck shouldn't be alarming unless you're facing problems that are disrupting your gaming experience, like stuttering or frame drops. Even then, there are ways to reduce the bottleneck with some settings tweaks, as we discussed above. That said when it's time to upgrade your PC, make sure you prioritize the weakest component, whether that's your CPU or GPU.