Will there be a bottleneck?
Will there be a bottleneck?
To fix both those problems, I'm not getting stuck on any game I mentioned. I only upgraded the graphics card, but I'm scared a stronger GPU will make the CPU get too busy and slow things down, causing games to feel bad at times.
You won't see worse performance. Will buying more stuff cause problems? Yes, it's called a bottleneck and happens if you buy too much. The CPU decides how fast your games go until something else stops you from going faster, like turning the graphics settings too high and making the video card run out of work to do.
GPUs don't slow down the CPU at all. The computer processor doesn't need the graphics card to keep running the game even if the GPU isn't ready yet. It just keeps going on its own tasks while waiting. Having good visuals is nice, but it's mostly for people who play video games and watch movies, not for everyone else.
Usually, any problem with your CPU gets really small quickly. There are already games that need so much graphics power that the 3060 will get stuck way before you even hit the 3700X. If I told you you had a 1700X, I would say upgrade to something better. But Zen 2 is still pretty strong for now.
I think the real issue is probably the CPU slowing down the GPU instead. Basically, when you get a new graphics card but an old and weak one stays behind, it can wait for work to finish before sending data to it. Usually, systems are pretty well balanced for most games because they mostly need your graphics power. You won't really have big problems with games that use your CPU too much, since those aren't affected at all until you start adding new stuff. The only change would be a game like Valorant doing a little better FPS than usual, but it should still work fine. There are websites that show you exactly how things are if you want to know for sure. Most of the advice here is probably too much worry anyway.
Those things are just trash unless you know what they do and which games work with them. If there isn't an easy way to get started, it's not useful.
I think most use sites like userbenchmark, which is pretty technical in what it can measure, and get a rough base from there because UBM talks in terms of X percentage higher or lower performance relatively speaking. However even TechPowerUp does this as far as measuring performance percentages of one GPU to another at a given resolution, which as far as I know is always taken from what percentage higher or lower FPS is produced. TPU is pretty technical with their hardware reviews. I prefer W1zzard's reviews, and he's the one that also wrote GPU-Z. He is very meticulous about making sure he always uses the exact same test bed to compare game and GPU performance. However Steve at Gamers Nexus is also very good, and GN even uses their own advanced method of measuring cooling capabilities. Ideally one learns about GPU model numbers and goes from there as far as staying in touch with the latest benchmarks, but these sites can serve as rough guides for those whom don't want to or don't have the time. As you said though, they aren't perfect. In their defense though, they can't be 100% consistent or even close to it, as many factors can affect such measurements, and beyond that, there's always a margin for error. I have also seen such tools produce odd results as you say, but I also consider an experienced gamer whom knows hardware capabilities reasonably well is going to be able to recognize when it's off. Normally I don't recommend such tools to those asking advice for that reason, so I probably shouldn't have made that comment, my bad.