My Graphics card is faster than my CPU like way too fast. I don’t know what that means.
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That means your GPU is being slowed down by your CPU’s performance. A bottleneck is where the bottle narrows down to a small opening. Your GPU is the wide area of the bottle and your CPU is the neck of the bottle. Things bunch up there and it slows down to the fastest rate at which the CPU can handle data. If your GPU can play a certain game at 120 fps, it’s being slowed down because the CPU can only do 70 fps.
A bottleneck is something causing a slowdown in a series of events.
Think of the shape of the neck of a wine bottle. It’s much thinner than the bottom of the bottle, so it doesn’t pour out too fast. If the top of the bottle was the same diameter of the bottom, it would spill all over when poured. The bottle neck causes the slow down.
In this case your CPU is causing the slowdown, affecting performance. The CPU is the control center of your computer, needed to run applications.
When you run a video game, there’s work done with the cpu, and there’s work done with the gpu (the processing chip on a graphics card). One way people measure the rate of work a system is doing is fps or frames per second. Normally, systems can produce as many frames as the GPU is capable of. Sometimes, the GPU could produce more than the entire system is currently producing but is limited by the work of the CPU. If the CPU doesn’t get its work done fast enough, the GPU basically has to wait for it. This is called “bottlenecking” because it’s like the flow of processing is being constricted like a bottleneck.
It means for any given application, such as a particular game, the performance may be limited in large part to one factor. That factor may be GPU or CPU or something else, depending on how the app uses it.
GPUs and CPUs are better suited for different tasks, and many apps/most games have a range of tasks suitable for one or the other.
Example: if a game is not super graphics heavy but has to compute lots of combinations of possibilities the CPU might be the bottleneck. If a game has lot of visual details/effects and 3D rendering, GPU is more likely to be bottleneck.
It can also be something else in rare instances, like memory bandwidth or disk speed. If you have to load a lot of different textures throughout the game, that becomes bottlenecking.
If a few people walked somewhere together the faster people would be held back by going at the pace of the slowest person.
Maybe they could get there twice as fast if that one slow person was swapped for someone faster.
Your graphics card isn’t able to run as fast as it possibly can because it’s waiting on your CPU to catch up all the time.
It’s called bottlenecking because the neck of a bottle does the same thing and prevents all the liquid from coming out at once compared to dumping out a cup of water.
Bottlenecking means a slowdown.
You know how you’re in kindergarten and playing during recess and the bell rings and hundreds of kids come running from the playground?
Well they can all run towards the building at the same time, but they can’t all go in the door at the same time.
The door is the bottleneck.
Your CPU and your GPU work together to play a game. The GPU draws the pictures, but it’s the CPU that tells the GPU what to draw even simple details like which way you’re looking. For every frame the CPU asks the GPU to draw and then display the frame. If you have a really fast GPU, but a really slow CPU it can happen that the GPU is spending a lot of timing waiting for the CPU to tell it to actually draw a picture or tell it what it should draw. We use the analogy of bottleneck because there will always be something that constrains the speed that your computer can do something. It might be the hard drive, the ram, or the CPU, but as fast as the other components are if they’re waiting they can’t do anything.
Different programs will do a better or worse job of pushing work onto the GPU. For some programs the CPU might not be the bottleneck if the GPU is just being told to move the scene around a bit and draw it again that isn’t very much for the CPU to do, but in others the CPU may need to load scene files or do some work every frame, in those games you’re slow CPU will result in a lower frame rate or the game freezing for a bit
If you pour water out of a bottle, what limits the water flow is how thin the neck of the bottle is. That’s where the name comes from.
In your case, it’s referring to which part of your system is limiting the overall performance. The GPU could in theory do more processing, but it’s waiting for the CPU to do its thing. So the CPU is the bottleneck: the part of the system that’s working at full capacity and the part that all the other components are waiting for.
Typically, it means the (low) performance of one component is causing another component to be unable to run at full/best speed.
Fastest as your strongest component. That component is the bottleneck, preventing full utilization.
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