@CdrKEEB Just saw your post.. I was also thinking that it was a CPU bottleneck.
I made a mistake in my OP: i now find that when i bump all my graphics to high, i get full utilization. My TOTAL cpu usage is well below 100%, but after watching my video (which i linked) a few more times, i see that most of the time, there is always a single core which is maxed out. (90% or higher).
My Afterburner stats refresh frequency is only 1 Hz, so sometimes it looks a little misleading. Instead i used task manager, changed the graph to 'show logical processors', and changed the refresh speed to 'high'.
From the graph, it definitely looks like a single core bottleneck, but its not consistent.. it kind of spikes up to 100% for a short time and back down, while some cores arent even being used. From what i understand from my programming classes, this is situation is a pretty good example of bad cpu multithreading optimization.
We are being bottlenecked by our cpu's SINGLE CORE performance, and since no processors exist with much higher than 5 GHz frequency, theres no hardware upgrade that will help
