4850 bottlenecked x2 4400?

[revol68]

Would a 4850 be bottlenecked by an x2 4400? Would a x2 4400 with a 4850 allow me to play Crysis maxed out at 1440x900?

[Webby]

How long is a piece of string?

The trouble is that we are unlikely to find bench marks for your system, I would say no you will not be bottlenecked by your processor, how much memory do you have? Have you tried overclocking the processor? Moving it up to 2.4 - 2.6GHz would probably be a benefit if possible.

As to Crysis running on an Intel Quad at 3.66GHz, 4GB of Memory a 4850 will play Crysis at 1680*1050 on medium settings with 16x AF average framerates of ~30 fps with no AF enabled you can move a few things up to High detail and achieve similar framerates (again at 1680*1050) so it is conceivable that at the lower resolution you may get most settings to High but by no means guaranteed.

All in all if you want to play crysis maxed out you are going to need something with a bit more umph like the GTX260 or 4870.

[kalniel]

Would a 4850 be bottlenecked by an x2 4400? Would a x2 4400 with a 4850 allow me to play Crysis maxed out at 1440x900?

As Webby implies, there's no general answer to your first question. There is *always* a bottleneck with a system, otherwise it would perform infinitely fast. As far as the GPU is concerned you 'bottleneck' when the card finishes with it's instructions before the rest of the computer has sent it new ones - that therefore relies on two factors: The complexity/size of the instructions it's been given, and speed of the rest of the computer.

So you'll find that when the instructions are simple and small, your GPU will finish it's instructions before the rest of the computer might be ready - ie play a physics or AI heavy game with the graphical details turned down and the limiting factor won't be your GPU, so despite the fact you're getting 100fps your card would be 'bottlenecked' by the CPU say.

Alternatively when the instructions are complex and large you could have a supercomputer feeding the data to the GPU and it wouldn't make any difference and you could be restricted to 15fps say.

Note in the above imaginary case the CPU bottleneck scenario would be giving you 100fps and the non-CPU bottlenecked 15fps - it's clear which is preferable!

That's a very long way of saying you need to know the game, resolution and detail settings before you can answer the question. In general older games will be likely to be bottlenecked by the CPU, however they will be running at such a high framerate for that not to be a problem.

Thankfully you give us a scenario in your second question, and the answer is no. However the limit is still the GPU, not the CPU.

How to tell
If you already have a game then it's easy to tell what is bottlenecking. Simply run the game at different resolutions (simulating higher resolutions with MSAA I guess if you can't otherwise).

If lowering the resolution increases fps, and raising it decreases fps then you are GPU limited.

If lowering or raising the resolution doesn't change fps you are CPU limited.

If lowering the resolution doesn't increase fps but raising it decreases fps then you are both CPU and GPU limited.