How to check if GPU is limited by CPU?

Is there an free application you can run that will see if you are CPU bound or GPU bound?

i.e. is my CPU slowing down my GPU and if I upgraded my CPU it could lead to better performance?

Thanks

install msi afterburner, this will also install RTSS.
You then configure OSD settings so in game you can see the following.
CPU usage
CPU clock speed
GPU usage
GPU clock speed
GPU power utilisation (if nvidia kepler or newer)
Framerate

Monitor these as you play on the screen and you can see if cpu or gpu max utilises.

An alternative which might be easier for you is just grab gpuz and have that running in the background (maybe also with logging enabled) and have it set to monitor whilst in background. That works on both amd/nvidia. GPUZ wont monitor cpu usage tho. But if you go the gpuz route, you can just leave task manager running in background to graph cpu usage.

All these are free tools.

Remember not all games are good at cpu multi core utilisation, so if you see one of e.g. four cores maxed out on the cpu that still probably means you cpu bottlenecked even if other 3 are idle.

Edited by Chrysalis (Sat 13-Aug-16 20:57:24)

Fantastic. Any suggestions of what I could run game wise? Perhaps something known to be CPU intensive and something known to be GPU intensive? I can then see if the game has a demo or benchmarking/automatic running mode. Thanks.

you should run what you normally play.

What is important is what you need for your favourite games.

GTA5 is known to be cpu intensive in city areas. My cpu is a bottleneck in GTA5, at the same time tho if you have grass detail high it will work GPUs hard outside the city.
DA:I is harder on GPU than CPU.
Project cars, GPU carries the workload.
My experience with FPS games like DOOM is they tend to be more GPU than CPU intensive.
Japanese rpg's can be CPU bound a lot because they tend to be coded by idiots who will only use one cpu core.
GTA5 and Mordor have benchmark modes although I think they not very good, better to just play them.

I used Shadow of Mordor to test my 4690k, on Afterburner. Never got round to overclocking it though.

The in game benchmark tool doesn't show much though, as chrysalis says.

What are your system specs?

BF4 is very cpu intensive- the witcher 3 and anything newish are good to test with.