bottleneck performance?

[Itseotle]

I'd highly recommend people read the thread so you're not asking the OP the same questions.

@OP: Have you updated your drivers lately? Having incompatible drivers to your mobo and gpu can cause performance issues. A year back I had stutter lag (on 14 only) which was due to a nvidia driver. Otherwise view ALL your temps under load and see if anything is bottlenecking your performance.

I know right. OP is not asking why there FPS is low in crowded areas... there asking why its low in crowded areas when there CPU/GPU are not maxing.

Question for you, you say your using an i5 (Quad Core CPU) that's capping at 70% across all cores. Is there any single core that is going over that 70%? One possibility is that your GPU is not being fed enough information because one of your 4 cores (usually core 0) is working harder than the other 3, which will bring down your over-all usage below 100%, but still bottleneck your GPU and FPS.

If it matters, I run into the same situation. I have an i5 clocked to 4500 MHz and a GTX 980. CPU cores never go above 70% either, and GPU never over 35%. FPS hovers about 35 in the most crowded parts of Mor Dhona so not really sure whats at play here. In case anyone else is wondering, GPU Mem Controller hasn't gone over 15%, and the GPU Memory is at 26.6%, RAM is at 4.2 GB used of 16 GB (DDR3 1600 with a CAS Latency of 7ms). Hard drive load times shouldn't matter as well as once your loaded in nothing else is pulling from the HDD. Samsung EVO SSD.