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BlueFalcon on 16 January 2017
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Conina said:
BlueFalcon said:

Your CPU is a huge bottleneck for GTX1080 at 1080p. The most you should buy is a GTX1070. Future proofing with a 1080 is a waste of time and money. You picked the worst time to buy a 1080 since NV is rumored to be launching 1080Ti around March 10th (PAX East). Sell the RX480 and get the cheapest open-air cooled on-blower GTX1070. Later on, sell your processor and buy a used 6700K/7700K and then upgrade to Volta in 2018-2019.

His CPU is a huge bottleneck? Even an ancient i5-2500K (not overclocked) is more than enough in most (not all) games:

 

Try to use more than 1 data source to draw conclusions, especially since Computerbase.de didn't provide the test scenes or videos to confirm they were testing CPU-limited sections of those games. It's also important to consider that frequent drops below 60 fps aren't reflected by those charts since we were not provided with frame times data.

Even Digital Foundry shows 2500K lacking compared to modern processors:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-is-it-finally-time-to-upgrade-your-core-i5-2500k

Read this thread and watch the 2 videos comparing 6400 to 6400 OC - in some games games, it's sufficient while in others it dips well under 60 fps while 6400@4.6Ghz flies:

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/techno-kitchen-i5-6400-3-1-ghz-vs-i5-6400-4-5ghz-w-gtx1060-2ghz-cpu-bottlenecking-explored.2492314/

I5-6400 is a massive bottleneck in many titles compared to the same CPU at 4.4-4.6Ghz. As I said, the OP should lower some settings or get a GTX1070 and then upgrade to a new CPU/platform down the line. 

I would also download HWMonitor, GPU-Z and MSI Afterburner to ensure there is no CPU/GPU thermal throttling. He needs to confirm that his card doesn't indeed run at 1266mhz and the CPU runs at least at 2.7Ghz. 

As I mentioned in my first post, various forms of AA such a simple MSAA/UberSampling in the Witcher games or SSAA in Tomb Raider, etc. are very GPU intensive and can easily bring 780Ti and R9 290X to 30-40 fps minimums. I am not trying to suggest that CPU is the primary problem here. However, should the OP upgrade to a GTX1070/1080, the CPU bottleneck will grow even more. 

It's easy to see a CPU bottleneck - drop the graphics settings from Ultra to High/Medium, and if performance barely goes up and minimums still tank, the graphics card is CPU bottlenecked. I would try other games and play around with the graphical settings. 

One other suggestion, put Windows power settings into High Performance mode, NOT balanced mode:

https://www.google.ca/amp/www.howtogeek.com/240840/should-you-use-the-balanced-power-saver-or-high-performance-power-plan-on-windows/amp/

I've encountered various cases where running Windows in anything other than High Performance mode sometimes cause she the CPU/GPU clocks to fluctuate significantly during gaming. Running Witcher 2 at 30 fps shows the OP enabled Uber-Sampling, has super-sampling set in his Radeon control panel, or there are some other issues with CPU/GPU utilization/clock speeds.