I'm bringing this up to share my findings about the subject, first off, i will list my currently rig setup:
2500K @ 5000Mhz (on H100 cooler)
Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H
16 GB (2x8) GSkill RipjawsX @ 1600Mhz 9-9-9-24 2T
Plextor M5-PRO 256Gb SSD
Sapphire Dual-X @ 1100/1600 Mhz
Seasonic Platinum 1000W
BenQ XL2411T (144hz)
Windows 7 64-bit
My goal is simple, as of BF3 i try to mantain as much as possible the 144FPS to match with my 144 hz display, i set all settings to LOW in BF3 except for MESH Quality which is set to ultra and Anisotropic Filtering which is set to 16x, FOV is at 70 value, all the rest is set to low, vsync off, FPS cap to 144, and of course no tripple buffering
I manage to handle a constant 144 FPS across most maps but there are certain situations in which i see dips in my FPS
Especially when i try Noshar Canals TDM 64P with tons of C4 dropping from sky and intense fight situations, or B2K maps in example on top of the TV Station looking around the map in Sharqi, i know that's all bound to CPU, and as long as i set low graphic settings i can confirm BF3 multiplayer is being CPU bottlenecked way too much, especially in my case i can notice this as i mentioned above i try to hold a steady 144 FPS and it's not the same power demand to hold 60 FPS vs 144 FPS
So that's my input but i would like to ask some questions if someone has experienced the same as i do
There's sometimes i have dips to 110-115 FPS in maps like Capture the Flag in Nebandan Flats, with 10 or 15 people per team populating the server, and just by driving a tank or walking around the map with not much action to say it so, i monitor my CPU usage and temp aswell as GPU with HWInfo and Rivatuner OSD , the strange thing is my CPU cores rarely goes beyond 85% usage across all 4 cores and the GPU sits confortably at 70-75% and i have dips to 110-115 like i said, shouldn't be the CPU stick to 100% usage as i assume it's CPU bound and if i have dips below 144 FPS this should be due CPU lack of raw power, i wonder why my CPU never reaches 100% usage , i have CPU core park disable and nothing working in the background except the monitoring tools
When in Noshar Canals and intense CPU bound situations i can see dips even as low as 90 FPS sometimes, it peaks between 90-110 but still my CPU never reaches 100% usage across any core, and the GPU i have seen it in the range of 60%-75% usage
So as far as i'm concerned CPU bottleneck should show CPU pegged at 100% usage and GPU to 50-60% , i fail to notice such but still have dips
Any thoughts?