Actually, you bring up a question that has been bugging me lately.
How do you calculate where a potential bottleneck will be?
My setup is a X570, 32GB DDR4, Ryzen 7 3700x, RTX 2070 Super, and gazillions of TB of storage on stuff don't worry about it.
Right now, I can max the GPU no problem. CPU is getting there depending on what I play. RAM I have no idea how it affects game performance just everything else I do.
Is there a formula? Can I just upgrade to a 4080 Ti Super if it fits in my case and power supply? Or do I need to spend the extra 1500 updating everything else
There's no concrete yes/no answer, it depends on the game you play so much as well.
Some games are really CPU heavy and that will be your bottleneck if there is one, others are primarily GPU heavy and won't rely on the CPU as much.
To answer your original question: you can mainly tell by doing benchmarks and watching your CPU/GPU usage. If your CPU is maxed the whole time but your GPU is chilling at 50-60% usage while you're getting below 60 FPS, you likely have a CPU bottleneck. There are a number of free benchmarks out there, and several "AAA" games will typically have one too (Forza, Returnal, and many others) so you can tune your system.
So buying a 4080Ti without the supporting parts it needs will limit how much performance you can get out of it. Nowadays RAM typically is not the bottleneck.
Speed of ram typically isn't a problem, but ram configuration absolutely can cause a bottleneck (that usually looks like a CPU bottleneck). The amount of companies selling a "gaming PC" with one god damned stick of ram drives me crazy. Single channel ram? In 2024 my dude?
I had a Ryzen 7 1700 with a 2070 non-super until earlier this year with next to no problems. The only reason I went to a 7800x3d was because it was bottlenecking the software I used to make music.
Bro, you might be onto something. The 4080 Super uses PCIe-4.0 which my motherboard has so no problems there.
But a 5700x3d doesn't have nearly the jump in performance id expect for throwing in a new $310 CPU.
NOW that being said, you made me look at socket AM4 CPUs and I can get a new Ryzen 9 5900x for $280, AND get the boost I want
5700x3D is $210 on Amazon and will about double your gaming performance.
https://youtu.be/WRK30P9_Tvg?si=rVrS2eOUR-BLtUZP
Time 14:06
I think LTT did a video on this recently actually.
The truth is there are some inflection points, but your chosen gaming resolution is going to affect things the most. If you are playing in 1080p, then you are leaving true performance on the table to not upgrade the rest. But if you are gaming at 4k, the GPU carries 95% of the biggest burden, so you are seeing only 5-10% improvements from changing your whole damn motherboard and cpu.
As time goes on this will change. But especially since 4k high end gaming is so intensive, the gains on cpu aren't massive. 1440p you get some moderate improvements from cpu / memory, etc, but 1080p is where you can see huge uplift.