How do I actually tell if my CPU is bottlenecking my new GPU?

Question

So I finally upgraded to a 5060 Ti Ventus a couple weeks back, coming off a card that was honestly ancient. Everything feels great, high settings, no complaints. Then a friend looks at my build and goes oh your CPU is totally bottlenecking that thing. Which, okay, maybe? But I genuinely can't see a problem when I'm playing. How do you actually check for this instead of just guessing? And is it true the whole thing basically stops mattering once you push the resolution up?

calibration_guy · Accepted Answer

The reason it looks fine is that at higher resolution the GPU becomes the limiter, so any CPU gap hides inside the average fps. It doesn't go away though. It still shows up in your 1% lows, and it comes back the moment you drop to 1080p, lower settings, or turn on upscaling, since that shrinks the internal render resolution. Easy check: if your fps barely moves when you drop resolution, you're CPU bound.

alexc · Answer

honestly at 4K the CPU mostly stops being the thing that matters, at least thats been my experience.