Difference between revisions of "Glossary:Bottleneck"
(informational first go) |
Dillonator (talk | contribs) |
||
| Line 2: | Line 2: | ||
Unfortunately, there is no surefire way to gauge if you have a bottleneck, nor what is potentially causing it. Your best bet is to find a pc gaming forum and ask around if you think you may be experiencing a bottleneck. A good rule of thumb is that if your CPU/RAM/GPU is 2 years or more older than the other components in your computer, then it may be causing a bottleneck. Use common sense though, if you put a new $400 graphics card in a 5 year old computer, chances are you will experience one or more bottlenecks. | Unfortunately, there is no surefire way to gauge if you have a bottleneck, nor what is potentially causing it. Your best bet is to find a pc gaming forum and ask around if you think you may be experiencing a bottleneck. A good rule of thumb is that if your CPU/RAM/GPU is 2 years or more older than the other components in your computer, then it may be causing a bottleneck. Use common sense though, if you put a new $400 graphics card in a 5 year old computer, chances are you will experience one or more bottlenecks. | ||
| + | |||
| + | A common bottleneck is the hard drive, fragmentation and an overabundance of small files (which slow down disk transfers) can cause 'hard stutters' (different from microstutter). Basic maintenance of a hard drive by defragmenting (SSD's needn't be defragged, an inherent attribute) can eliminate this almost completely. If you still experience hard stutters even with no fragmentation, check to make sure your hard drive definitely is fast enough, 7200RPM is recommended, 5400RPM is acceptable. | ||
{{stub}} | {{stub}} | ||
[[Category:Hardware]] | [[Category:Hardware]] | ||
[[Category:Guide]] | [[Category:Guide]] | ||
Revision as of 02:43, 13 February 2013
A bottleneck is a situation that arises when an underpowered component limits the performance of another component. For example, running Battlefield 3 on a single core CPU will severely impact the frame rate. Another example is not having enough RAM to run a game and the operating system, resulting in slowdowns.
Unfortunately, there is no surefire way to gauge if you have a bottleneck, nor what is potentially causing it. Your best bet is to find a pc gaming forum and ask around if you think you may be experiencing a bottleneck. A good rule of thumb is that if your CPU/RAM/GPU is 2 years or more older than the other components in your computer, then it may be causing a bottleneck. Use common sense though, if you put a new $400 graphics card in a 5 year old computer, chances are you will experience one or more bottlenecks.
A common bottleneck is the hard drive, fragmentation and an overabundance of small files (which slow down disk transfers) can cause 'hard stutters' (different from microstutter). Basic maintenance of a hard drive by defragmenting (SSD's needn't be defragged, an inherent attribute) can eliminate this almost completely. If you still experience hard stutters even with no fragmentation, check to make sure your hard drive definitely is fast enough, 7200RPM is recommended, 5400RPM is acceptable.