Yes, you might see a difference in FPS depending on your CPU.
Yes, you might see a difference in FPS depending on your CPU.
It varies by game; if you enjoy titles like Civ 6, Cities Skylines, or classic games such as CS:GO, you'll see a noticeable impact. For most modern GPU-dependent games—like Destiny 2, the latest COD, Overwatch, Fortnite, etc.—you'll likely experience only small gains, around 3 to 5 frames per second at most.
The term bottleneck fits well, but we should focus more on “experience.” Bottlenecks are mainly hardware-related; even with a big bottleneck, if you still get the experience you need, it’s not a huge problem. Perhaps you overspent on a part, but it could still provide some benefit.
In multi-threaded games you may experience performance drops. The extent varies by title. AC Unity runs on a full Intel 3rd Gen Quad-core processor, while AC Syndicate performs slightly better but still sees 80-100% usage on quad cores with faster GPUs. Most games push higher frame rates and CPU load when using a faster GPU on a quad-core system. An I7 chip can handle most of this, though some 8-thread aware titles still demand 65-100% of a hyperthreaded quad-core. The specific game plays a big role. BFV tends to cause issues with 4C8T CPUs at 80-100% more often.