Is My CPU Bottlenecking My RTX 3060 in Modern Games?

Depends what you mean by dropping frames. If you're already on a high FPS, it could be a CPU heavy area of the game. So instead of 100fps, you'll get less, but not 100% usage on your GPU as it's CPU related slow down.

Haven't got Elden Ring, but I know Cyberpunk has CPU heavy areas.

Hello, Flipp_308.

We appreciate you posting in Microsoft Community.



I have noticed that you are experiencing severe frame drops while playing some of the games.

I'm glad to have the opportunity to give you some advice.



I'm a player of both games as well, and having experienced both games with different configurations, I thought I'd offer you some advice.



At 1080p resolution with medium quality and ray tracing turned off, your setup should actually give you a decent gaming experience and the framerate shouldn't fluctuate so much.

However, your CPU may become a bottleneck, and this may be the most worthwhile upgrade at this point in time. If you need to upgrade your CPU, then your power supply and motherboard may need to be upgraded as well.



Here are their configuration recommendations:

Elden Ring:







Cyberpunk 2077:







You can search the web for graphics card and CPU performance lists and compare them with your device to determine what you need to upgrade.



Best Regards.

Jeffrey - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

bottleneck how? the graphics putting too much info too quickly for the gpu? You think the mobo and cpu need to be upgraded?? those both are still pretty high end even though far from state of the art today...

MSFS2020 is as highly CPU heavy as it is GPU heavy. I've got a similar processor to you yours (i7 8700 non K version) and an RTX 3070. Just getting a stable 60 is a struggle. You'd need something more akin to the 12th Gen i7 for the frame rates you're after.

CPU's don't just handle game logic, they continually 'draw' the scene for the GPU. The GPU takes this data and renders it. If the GPU can't receive the frames to render from the CPU fast enough, you'll get a bottleneck.

Couldn't agree more, MS 2020 is pretty much one of the worst games for being CPU bottlenecked, the OP can throw a top end Nvidia RTX 4000 series GPU at this game but without a monster of a CPU, the game will just be bottlenecked.

Personally I would save up and go for a full system build, and if it was me, id go with an AMD processor over an Intel (though I can understand why people LOVE Intel CPUs)

pc my specs are rtx 3060(latest driver) i5 12 gen

My GPU is Nvidia RTX 3060, CPU is Intel Core I9 12900k, and 64 GB of ram. Here is my connection: