Most bottleneck calculators return a single percentage produced by an undisclosed formula. That number is not measurable, cannot be checked against reality, and does not tell you what to do. This page explains exactly how our estimates are produced so you can judge them yourself.
The core idea
A frame has to pass through both the processor and the graphics card. Each can sustain some maximum rate on its own. The machine runs at the slower of the two. So instead of inventing a bottleneck percentage, we estimate two ceilings separately and compare them.
The component with the lower ceiling is the one limiting you. The gap between the two ceilings is the performance you have paid for and are not using.
Why resolution changes the answer
Rendering more pixels gives the graphics card more work. It does not give the processor more work. This is why the same pair of parts can be processor-limited at 1080p and graphics-limited at 4K, and it is the single biggest thing other calculators get wrong. Our processor ceiling barely moves with resolution; our graphics ceiling scales with pixel count, very slightly sublinearly because some per-frame work is fixed.
Where the numbers come from
We do not republish third-party benchmark scores. Every hardware figure in our database is a published manufacturer specification: shader counts, clock speeds, memory bandwidth, core counts, cache sizes, board power.
From those specifications we compute throughput. On the graphics side that is shader count multiplied by clock, multiplied by an architectural work-per-shader coefficient, then adjusted for two real effects: memory bandwidth starvation on narrow-bus cards, and the sublinear scaling of very wide dies whose front end cannot keep the shader array fed.
On the processor side it is gaming instructions per clock multiplied by boost frequency, with a saturating bonus for the cores a game engine can actually use, and a term for L3 cache size. That cache term is why 3D V-Cache processors rank where they do here without needing a special case written for them.
Calibration
Architectural coefficients are not guesses. They are derived by anchoring to well-established equivalences between real products — for example, that an RTX 4070, an RTX 3080, an RX 6800 XT and an RX 7800 XT all land within a few percent of each other, and that a GTX 1080 Ti performs like an RTX 3060 Ti. Solving for the coefficients that reproduce those relationships gives us values that then predict the rest of the range.
What this cannot tell you
These are model estimates, not measurements. They will not capture memory speed and timings, driver version differences, thermal or power limits in a specific case, background load, a particular game patch, or the difference between an open field and a dense city centre in the same title. Treat the output as a well-reasoned expectation, not a promise.
If a result looks wrong to you and you have measured data that says otherwise, we want to hear about it — that is how the calibration improves.