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First some facts: I have an MSI GT70 gaming laptop equipped with a GeForce GTX 780M 4GB graphics card. I am considering upgrading to an MSI GT72 equipped with a GTX 980M 8GB graphics card.

I play all games on 1920 x 1080 resolution, and currently (with the 780M card) I play usually around medium-high settings for a smooth 60FPS experience. The GT70's display is 60Hz and I assume the GT72 also is 60Hz.

Now for the questions: I read on a website that CPU bottlenecks can be a problem when the graphics cards get this good. First of all, what does CPU bottleneck mean? If I use vsync on all games to lock them to 60, then that essentially means I can run all games on Ultra on the 980M and get a smooth 60FPS experience, doesn't it? Why would the CPU be affected by this? Am I misunderstanding something?

The way I see it, if I want to play at 1080p resolution and 60FPS for the rest of my life, then I can do that and I will be able to use amazing, ultra settings since the fancy new graphics cards being released are able to comfortably handle it at my resolution and framerate. Am I wrong?

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    A CPU bottlekneck means that the software is waiting for the CPU to do something instead of the I/O of a HDD/RAM or the GPU.
    – Ramhound
    Feb 25, 2015 at 21:23

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A CPU bottleneck basically means the CPU is the slowest part on your system, it affects you by capping everything else to its speed.

For example: In a bakery, their oven can produce 40 muffins per minute but their packaging machine can only pack 12 muffins per minute. The bottleneck here is the packing machine, which results in a throughput of 12 muffins per minute.

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I'm not sure what your problem is you are asking about. If this is a general question about "what to be aware of" then, yes you should consider the CPU performance. If the question pertains to particular behaviour of your laptop then having a description of those symptoms would be helpful.

CPU Bottleneck in general refers to the issue of data flow. Imagine the data flowing around your computer, it lives on disc drive and RAM. It flows through the CPU to be mangled and sent back to RAM. Sometimes data is sent to the GPU for further processing (aka rendering).

If the game you are playing relies on a lot of calculations on the data to determine new visuals, or say must interact over the network, these are additional processing steps which must happen before the GPU even gets hold of the data to render.

CPU bottleneck specifically implies the software (game) is trying to compute too much data. Your GPU might be capable of rendering it as fast as it gets it, but if it gets the data slowly ... then the frame rate is slow.

Freely change CPU for RAM, Network, Disc.

The real question then becomes, how do you determine which is the bottleneck? - check CPU usage - always 100%?
- check RAM usage - always 100%? - check network I/O ... you get the idea.

In the end, you need to have sufficient RAM to store the data, sufficient CPU throughput (aka MHZ) to process the data, sufficient disc I/O and network I/O to transport the data and sufficient GPU to render. once all those components line up, your game will blaze along at mega-joule frames per second.

And, lastly, no this will not last you forever.

As games become more sophisticated they will inevitably require more RAM, more CPU, more disc/network I/O and more GPU rendering.

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