Understanding PC Hardware Bottlenecks
A bottleneck in a personal computer occurs when one component—most commonly either the processor (CPU) or graphics card (GPU)—reaches 100% capacity, preventing the remaining system components from achieving their full performance potential.
Resolution Shifts: CPU-Bound vs GPU-Bound
At 1080p resolution, games process frames so rapidly that the CPU often becomes the primary limiting factor in preparing draw calls. However, as resolution increases to 1440p and 4K UHD, the workload shifts dramatically to the GPU due to the exponential increase in pixel counts (8.3 million pixels at 4K vs 2.07 million at 1080p).