How to overcome the bottleneck and enhance the efficiency of your device?
Bottleneck! Have you ever felt that your computer is dying in various ways and no matter how much you make adjustments or buy the most expensive parts, it fails as usual, why? A lot of questions that arise and in the end we get rid of your PC and get another, but let me explain to you the idea of the bottleneck or as we call it "bottleneck" Imagine that the computer is a chain, and the weakest link in this chain is the one that determines the power of the entire chain, in this article we will learn what is a bottleneck and how it affects the performance of your device? In addition to how it is diagnosed and treated.
What is Bottleneck?
"Bottleneck" in PC systems, the idea of bottleneck that the parts of the device carry differences in performance and strength, which leads to the insufficient exploitation of one of the pieces, bottlenecks are a common problem that can limit overall performance and affect the user experience, the nature of the bottleneck is the poor performance of one of the components of the system so that it cannot keep up with the speed of other components, which leads to a restriction of the overall processing capacity, this situation often occurs in Many intensive computational tasks, such as HD gaming, video editing, or data analysis.
What causes "bottleneck"?
From the definition of bottleneck, you may think that the main reason for creating this problem from the beginning is the poor performance of one of the components of the system, that is, it cannot coordinate with the other components, but this is completely wrong, there are many reasons that we will explain to you in detail:
Incompatibility between components:
- Processor and memory: If the processor is too powerful and the memory is slow, the processor will have to wait for data to arrive from memory, slowing down performance.
- Processor and graphics card: If the processor cannot supply data to the graphics card quickly enough, the graphics card will not work at full capacity.
Selection of unbalanced ingredients:
- Buying one high-performance component: For example, buying a very powerful graphics card with an average processor will cause a bottleneck in the processor.
- Lack of consideration: Buying components is much stronger than you need for everyday use as you can't buy a gaming computer for regular office functions centered around Microsoft Office.
Coders:
- Malware: Malware may consume system resources and slow performance.
- Programs running in the background: These programs may consume part of the system resources and affect the performance of other programs.
Physical factors:
- Overheating: Overheating of components may reduce their performance.
- Cooling problems: If the cooling system is inadequate, the components will overheat resulting in automatic overclocking.
Lack of storage space:
- Hard Drive: If the hard drive is full, the operating system and programs will have difficulty accessing files, resulting in slow performance.
Thus, we have explained the most important reasons that cause "bottleneck", but how do we recognize these reasons when using a personal computer (PC), as shown above that most factors may be very clear to know, but the biggest problem is knowing if the processor and the graphics card are not compatible together, how will we know about this?
Find out if the processor is causing the "bottleneck" of the graphics card
Here is the best way to check if your computer has a bottleneck problem, is to monitor the consumption of both the processor and the screen card when you play a game, to do this, you can use one of the computer performance monitoring programs, such as: MSI Afterburner
MSI Afterburner, this is a very powerful and free program, it not only helps monitor the performance of computer components during operation or while playing, but also to reduce the speed of the graphics card if necessary, In any case, if you want to monitor performance using MSI Afterburner, all you have to do after installing and running the program:
- Click the "Settings" button to open the settings window.
- We head to the Monitoring tab.
- Select CPU usage.
- Then tick next to the "Show in On-Screen Display" option
- Then do the same with GPU usage
- When finished, click OK to save the settings.
The image below illustrates the previous steps.
After these steps that were explained above, we will not close the program, on the contrary, we will minimize the program window in order to continue working, and then open the RivaTuner program, which is usually included with the MSI Afterburner program during installation.
To open this program, all you have to do is double-click on its minimized icon on the taskbar "in the notification area", and from the main interface, all you have to do is activate the Show On-Screen Display option, then minimize the window.
When you have completed all the following steps, close everything unnecessary that works except MSI Afterburner and RivaTuner, immediately after which launch the game that we are going to test on.
While playing look at the numbers displayed in the upper left corner of the screen, these numbers represent the current actual performance of both the CPU and the GPU, if you notice that the processor consumption exceeds the consumption of the graphics card [as shown in the picture] or at a low or medium level, then you have a bottleneck problem due to the processor, and therefore you must buy a new and modern processor to match the performance of the graphics card.
Of course, we all do not want to fall into the bottleneck when assembling a computer or even when updating a component, here we resort to what is called bottleneck rate measurement tools.
Bottleneck Rate Measuring Instruments
Certainly, we do not want to get into the problem of the bottleneck and to avoid such problems in the future, we have to learn about the tools that enable you to measure and know the bottleneck rate between the graphics card and the processor before assembling the computer or even before upgrading the graphics card, so things will be much clearer, so let's start by viewing the tools:
Bottleneck Calculator Tool
Bottleneck Calculator is a bottleneck calculator tool or we can say that it is an online tool designed to help you assess the compatibility between the components of your computer and determine which component may become a "bottleneck" and limit the performance of the system in general, in addition to that it can measure the rate of bottleneck that may occur between the components of the computer before buying it, so that you get the most of it.
How does the Bottleneck Calculator tool work?
The tool asks you to enter information about the components of your device such as the processor, graphics card and RAM from the available list, and then click on Calculate to see the result, as shown in the image below.
GPU Benchmark Comparison Tool
GPU Benchmark Comparison is a computer program designed to test and evaluate the performance of graphics cards (GPUs), through which you can also measure the bottleneck, these tools run a series of complex tests on the graphics card to measure its ability to process graphics, and thus determine its suitability for certain tasks such as gaming, graphic design, or scientific computing.
How does GPU Benchmark Comparison work?
All we have to do is add the graphics card and the processor to measure and determine if the bottleneck may occur or not, and we may see in the pictures below, that there is a comparison between a powerful graphics card while the processor is weak and another comparison between a powerful processor and a similar graphics card, the less the result and the lower the percentage, the better, as this number and percentage represent the rate of the processor's effect on frames.
Important: The results of these tools are not 100% accurate, they are estimates based on existing data.
In the end, we have explained everything related to the bottleneck from the main concepts and causes of bottleneck and how to treat this problem, in addition to how to measure bottleneck in different ways, to learn more follow the Arfni website.