Thanks to both of you !
I use indeed the AMD dlss equivalent thing in ac and acc .
As i never had problem with the cpu until now, difficult to judge.
It runs currently at about 50% i would say (gpu at 100% of course). I suppose i have some reserve (i could overclock it too ???)
FSR from AMD sadly is nowhere near the quality of dlss in ACC. For example: at the outside of the first chicane at Spa, you have some telephone wires and with TAA, they are "steppy", aliased. With dlss, they are smoother than with TAA. With fsr, they have flickering gaps!
Anyway, about your CPU:
As long as the load isn't 99%, it's completely useless, sadly.
It's because all simracing titles have fewer application threads, than your cpu has cpu threads (cores * 2 due to hyperthreading).
Imagine it like you have workers with 2 arms and infinitely long nails that need to go into the wall.
AC has 2 nails, you cpu has 6 workers with 2 arms.
So 2 workers hit one nail each in parallel, while their second arm is doing nothing (imagine the nail being already far enough into the wall to be stable).
The other 4 workers do basically nothing apart from providing drinks, vacuuming dust from the hammering, answering questions from colleagues etc.
The moment one worker becomes tired, the next worker will get to the nail and continue.
So if a game only provides a single thread, more than 2 cores won't give you any higher fps. 1 core calculates the game, the other is managing the OS, Discord etc.
In theory, your 6 cores, 12 thread cpu can hit the "single thread performance limit" (or single nail limit
) at 100% / 12 = 8.33% cpu load.
However you're seeing all cores having some load on them.
That's because at 1s refresh interval and 4 GHz clock speed, you're seeing 4.000.000.000 cpu cycles (hammer hits) per core averaged.
Every core did something, but it resulted only in barely more fps compares to a cpu without hyperthreading and only 3 cores.
But to give you a solution to this and why you should test with reduced resolution:
The graphics card's load is always the correct indicator. (with about 5% tolerance due to dx9 vs 12, dlss, rtx, nvenc Video encoding etc etc).
It doesn't have that issue if parallel threads.
If your graphics card is below 95% load, the bottleneck is either an fps limiter (or vsync) or your CPU.
The important bit:
Graphic settings also change the amount of "draw calls" that the CPU has to prepare. But this doesn't scale with resolution!
So if your graphics card has infinite performance and your graphics settings stay the same, your CPU bottlenecked FPS will basically be identical no matter if you're using 1280x720 or 4k.
So to test your CPU performance, just keep everything identical but put the resolution to the lowest possible. Or at least reduce it until your graphics card only shows no more than 70% load.
And that's also why I always recommend the CPUs with fewest cores, but highest clock speed within a generation. And always the newest generation.
One issue is that the CPUs with more cores also have more cache. And the effect of cache can be seen with the 5800x3D and 7800x3D, which both dominate the ACC benchmarks.
But I'd always buy a 13600k over a 12900k or a 7600x over a 5950x etc.
You don't need more workers, you need the best workers for simracing.
Your 8700k is an awesome CPU though! It had way more performance than its predecessors and basically identical performance up to Intel's 12th gen.
I'm not convinced that it could keep up with a 4070 though.
3070 ti or 3080 will not be an option for single screen at 1080p ??
( maybe with some upscaling )
Mh yes and no. The 40xx are a lot more efficient and have more vram and also better dlss & rtx performance.
Energy costs barely make it worth it, but having 100W less in your room might be cool. Literally.
I definitely feel the difference between undervolting + losing 10% performance with my 3080 to only consume 170-220W in ACC vs no dlss, needing the 10% performance and having it consume 300-350W.
Massive difference in air quality without an AC.
So if you want to keep it as long as your 10xx, I'd recommend a 40xx card.
It depends on the price though. If you can find a 3080 for less than a 4070 non-ti, I'd get the 3080.
