What does it mean when someone says a game is “CPU bound”?

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So I have a 1080p monitor, so when i look into games im interested in, i go and see how my specs perform at that resolution. When I was looking at Marvel’s Spider Man, the reviewer said that the game was CPU bound at 1080p. I assumed this to mean that the GPU won’t be utilized much, however when I eventually bought the game, I had a consistent 80+% GPU utilization. What exactly does being CPU bound mean then?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

You ever here the term “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link”? They’re saying the CPU is the weakest link for that specific game. And to be clear, there will always be a weakest link in your system. Your computer is like a factory assembling frames to display on your monitor, and it can only run as fast as the slowest “worker”. When a game is less graphically demanding, the GPU might be able to dish out its work really fast, but the CPU can’t keep up, so you’re only able to get a framerate that your CPU can handle, whereas if you had a better CPU (with the same GPU), you’d have a higher framerate.

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