Battlefield framerate: is my CPU or GPU the bottleneck?

I have a similar problem with Battlefield 3. In BF3, no matter what I do, the framerate will be in the 15-40fps range. 60fps only if I look into the sky. If I have everything at low and at 640x480, I can't get a stable 60fps going.

I have the same problem with BF4. Am I CPU bound? I have a A4-5300, which I found out has no L3 cache and only 1mb of L2 cache. I have 4gb of system memory and a Geforce 650 GTX. Am I just bottle-necked?

UPDATE Just as a follow up, I went from the dual core AMD, to a "quad" core AMD. The quotations marks are there because AMD is a little shady about what they mean with cores. The quad core AMD performed much better and BF3 and 4 became playable, but the FPS still struggled more than I thought it would, but it was playable. I recently said screw it, bought a i7 4790k Devil's Canyon CPU and now things are perfect. I still have a modest Radeon 270 2gb, but the performance is excellent on all high. BF3 and 4 just demand a solid CPU, mine is overkill now, but you must have a true quad core!

Solution 1:

Bring down the console with the ~ (tilde) key and type

render.perfoverlayvisible 1

Leave that up while playing. What you're looking for here is spikes that show you what the bottleneck is: CPU (yellow) or GPU (green).

Solution 2:

The A4-5300 is a dual-core 3.2Ghz CPU. I wouldn't want to try and run BF3 or 4 on a dual-core chip, a quad core at least. 4GB and GTX 650 should be fine. Have a look at CanIRunIt - systemrequirementslab.com/cyri - and see what it says about your system.

Solution 3:

Yes, this sounds very much like the CPU is your culprit. Similar for me (Core 2 Quad 3 GHz). I'm able to pick pretty much any graphics setting on my GTX 680 without significantly influencing my frame rate (except when using oversized rendering like 200%).

Although keep in mind that the current beta is most likely a not optimized debug build; so performance might (and most likely will) still increase quite a bit for the official release.

Solution 4:

A while back I've switched from Athlon II X2 245e to i5 3550, while keeping same graphics card, which is HD7750 (factory OC'd to 880MHz). AFAIK, this GPU performs slightly worse in BF3/BF4 than your GTX650. After change of CPU frame-rate in BF3 improved drastically, and BF4beta is playable at 1920x1200.