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How does one define a "Bottleneck" ?????
- Thread starter The Cobra
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Brent_Justice
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Something that that keeps something else from performing at its fullest abilities.
Darth Bobo
[H]ard|Gawd
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Imagine a 10" pipe with the capacity to let 500 cubicfeet of water to flow trough it each minute. If you connect that 10" pipe to a 1" pipe which allows only 25 cubicfeet of water to flow trough it each minute, how much water can then flow trough the intire system? 
Blazestorm
Supreme [H]ardness
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You upgrade every part of your computer except for the video card...
Excluding the video card, your computer is completely top-of-the-line...
Yet when you try to play 3D games it's slow and choppy... even simple ones that you should be able to play...
That would be the bottleneck...
Excluding the video card, your computer is completely top-of-the-line...
Yet when you try to play 3D games it's slow and choppy... even simple ones that you should be able to play...
That would be the bottleneck...
Brent_Justice
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An extreme example:
You have a computer with a 1 MHz CPU and an 8800 GTX. The CPU is your bottleneck.
You have a computer with a 1 MHz CPU and an 8800 GTX. The CPU is your bottleneck.
Caffeinated
[H]ard|Gawd
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A "bottleneck" is one component that slows the whole system down.
Dial-Up is a bottleneck - the system can process and display a web page in a instant, but when surfing the internet, your system has to wait for the data to arrive before it can display the page.
With that said, it seems like every third post is someone asking if their processor is "bottlenecking" their video card. I consider a video card as helping the rest of the system if it allows you to play games at higher resolution and with more eyecandy than it would with a slower one. Your CPU becomes a bottleneck when no matter what video card you put in your system, your game is slow.
Another example would be an OC'd Core 2 Duo with integrated graphics. No matter how fast your processor is, you aren't going to be able to run many games, because your system has poor video processing ability.
Dial-Up is a bottleneck - the system can process and display a web page in a instant, but when surfing the internet, your system has to wait for the data to arrive before it can display the page.
With that said, it seems like every third post is someone asking if their processor is "bottlenecking" their video card. I consider a video card as helping the rest of the system if it allows you to play games at higher resolution and with more eyecandy than it would with a slower one. Your CPU becomes a bottleneck when no matter what video card you put in your system, your game is slow.
Another example would be an OC'd Core 2 Duo with integrated graphics. No matter how fast your processor is, you aren't going to be able to run many games, because your system has poor video processing ability.
On the Lam
Limp Gawd
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the one part that can't keep up with all the other parts - in other words, the weakest part
In a system where the actual speed is defined to be only as fast as the slowest component, the slowest component becomes the bottleneck.
Example:
Say you have a factory, and you have a conveyor belt, and one end some plastic parts are put on. First the plastic parts pass through a machine which assembles them into car shape. Second a machine glues them parts in place. Third a machine then spraypaints the toy car, and the end result is a fully assemled toy car.
In this system each of the 3 stages has a different speed, the assembly machine can assemble 50 cars every minute, the the glueing machine can only glue 10 cars every minute, and the spray paint machine can spray cars at a whopping 100 cars per minute.
The although some of the components in the system are fast, such as the spraypainting machine which can reach 100cpm, if you try and run the system at that speed the assembly machine and the glueing machine wont be able to keep up and you end up with toy cars that are not finished.
To make sure that each car gets correctly put together the system can only run as fast as the slowest component, which in this case is the glueing machine, which is 10 cars per minute.
Take this into a real world example and you might consider a computer with a processor, some RAM and video card. The system is incredibly more complex than our conveyor belt however the same basic priciples apply. A game running on this sytem needs to draw a certain amount resoruces from each component, the system can only run as fast as the slowest component.
For example your CPU might be able to generate code fast enough so the game can run at 100 FPS (frame per second) and the graphics card might only be able to draw 50 frames per second. The resulting output is only as fast as the slowest component, in which case we only see 50 FPS on screen.
At this point if we were to upgrade our CPU so it can calculate the code fast enough for 200 frames per second it would not increase the speed of the game.
When upgrading your computer it's often best to first consider upgrading the part of your computer you consider to be the bottleneck, this way you see the greatest real world performance increase.
Example:
Say you have a factory, and you have a conveyor belt, and one end some plastic parts are put on. First the plastic parts pass through a machine which assembles them into car shape. Second a machine glues them parts in place. Third a machine then spraypaints the toy car, and the end result is a fully assemled toy car.
In this system each of the 3 stages has a different speed, the assembly machine can assemble 50 cars every minute, the the glueing machine can only glue 10 cars every minute, and the spray paint machine can spray cars at a whopping 100 cars per minute.
The although some of the components in the system are fast, such as the spraypainting machine which can reach 100cpm, if you try and run the system at that speed the assembly machine and the glueing machine wont be able to keep up and you end up with toy cars that are not finished.
To make sure that each car gets correctly put together the system can only run as fast as the slowest component, which in this case is the glueing machine, which is 10 cars per minute.
Take this into a real world example and you might consider a computer with a processor, some RAM and video card. The system is incredibly more complex than our conveyor belt however the same basic priciples apply. A game running on this sytem needs to draw a certain amount resoruces from each component, the system can only run as fast as the slowest component.
For example your CPU might be able to generate code fast enough so the game can run at 100 FPS (frame per second) and the graphics card might only be able to draw 50 frames per second. The resulting output is only as fast as the slowest component, in which case we only see 50 FPS on screen.
At this point if we were to upgrade our CPU so it can calculate the code fast enough for 200 frames per second it would not increase the speed of the game.
When upgrading your computer it's often best to first consider upgrading the part of your computer you consider to be the bottleneck, this way you see the greatest real world performance increase.
fill a bottle with water, pour it out, see how long it takes, cut off the bottleneck, see how long it takes
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