spätestens da hat's mich zerrissen
grammatron:
it's different from game to game. GPU is the bottleneck in most of the latest games, especially when played in high quality and high resolution. on lowest settings and lowest resolution it is the other way round (CPU is the bottleneck). but this is for benchmarking purposes only, because no one plays at 800x600 on lowest settings and it does not matter whether you have 240 or 300 fps at low settings. on the other hand, it does matter whether you have 25 or 35 fps at high settings (and compared to low settings you won't reach 35 by overclocking the CPU)
Ja, I agree. It's different depending on the game. The CSS was just one example from way back. The same principle applies though that a GPU can be limited by a cpu if the clock speed is too low. Of course this is probably less of an issue with quad core cpu's and I agree that the GPU is really the bottleneck with the latest games of course. Crysis Warhead has even more advanced graphics than the original and even a 4870 x2 doesn't give such impressive results.
I should also explain the problem I had with Unreal Tournament 3 as well. When I had my core duo (E6300) which was overclocked to 3.6ghz, my FPS on some maps in multiplayer would drop to a very low level (less than 24). The worst affected map was Shangrila. A friend of mine was running the game with a lower clocked version of my BFG 8800gt and he said his FPS never dropped on that map. So the only difference between our machines was the cpu. He had a quad core, I had a dual. Since upgrading to the Q6600, UT3 now runs all maps on max detail with no drop in FPS.
But of course, as you say, the GPU can also be the bottleneck and this is what I find with crysis on my 8800gt. Overclocking the GPU can't stop crysis from running slow on high detail.