You’re disrespecting the 4070 with that CPU

I mean I’m not an expert but it seems like a massive CPU bottleneck

Your framerate is capped at 60fps, which means that the average can only be lower than that.

Based on the 58fps average, I would expect this to be totally playable.

The occasional dip as low as 48fps probably isn’t great, but could be a heck of a lot worse.

If you’re CPU bound, consider increasing the resolution scaling to shift more work to the GPU.

While your CPU is probably a bottleneck for that GPU, as long as you get a playable experience that’s not really as big of an issue as the internet would make you think. You’re leaving performance on the table. Reframe: you’re saving some performance headroom so that when you do inevitably upgrade to a newer CPU, that upgrade will feel even more impactful.

CPU bottleneck.

That seems 100% fine to me. If you're looking for an excuse, by all means upgrade but those numbers seem acceptable.

2077 is a rather intense game, but there are mods to ease the CPU burden and get that FPS up, if you are interested.

Most games aren’t so intense.

Also, unfortunately, Nvidia cards tend to prefer Windows. I was just asking about Windows vs Linux performance for 2077 specifically in another thread, and the consensus seems to be you are sacrificing a little bit of FPS over (sufficiently neutered) Windows, especially if certain proton features aren’t working.

And I am not anti Linux at all, I spend like 95% of my PC time in CachyOS on my dual boot desktop. But every time I've measured it in the past… that’s just how it is, even with a riced gamer Linux distro.

4790k was among the fastest per-core performance for many, many generations, even long after CPUs with 4x as many cores that could do 2x as much work total, 4790k could still beat them on single-core performance.

Even today it's still a great CPU and I'm still running one of my gaming machines with it. I use it for my Windows machine, since it doesn't support TPM it will never get upgraded to Windows 11 accidentally and I consider that a feature lol.

It's definitely getting long in the tooth these days, and its memory bandwidth is starting to really let it down, but as a CPU doing CPU things, it was a really nice piece of hardware, and still is.

If I understand aright, the complaint is that a 4790K doesn't support TPM 2.0, required for Windows 11, and Windows 10 is EOLing.

I mean, sure, you can put Linux on it. I use Debian myself, but I'm sure whatever major distro would be fine. I think that most people are likely to tell you to use whatever distro they use.

Debian tends to be a little more conservative about doing new major stable releases than a number of distros, usually about once every two years. Ubuntu, for example, does a new release every six months (or did last I looked). That could be good or bad, depending upon how frequently you want to deal with upgrades, how much testing you want your application software to get, and how recent you want it to be. I tend to use Debian testing on the desktop, rather than waiting for stable releases, but I'm also comfortable fixing the machine if anything goes wrong.

Is it a reasonable machine to keep using? I mean, I dunno. Depends on what you're doing with it. If you were happy with performance as things have been, sure. Serial compute performance hasn't been increasing very quickly since about the early 2000s. Lots of tasks rely on serial compute. Will it play the latest AAA game as well as the newest hardware? Probably not. Linux will give you more flexibility to maybe use a lighter desktop environment if you want, but a given game or web browser is still gonna have to run the same calculations. Putting Linux on it won't normally make a game run twice as quickly or something like that.

You could probably buy a better cpu 2nd hand for dirt cheap if needed.

It better not be. I'm still using a 4790k!

1080p

Literally unplayable

If you're going to throw that out, let me know which dumpster. I'd love to drop-in replace my 4690K from one of my old machines and upgrade the RAM. 😉

4790K is still a decent CPU, even if it and the DDR3 memory are starting to show their age. Definitely still suitable for 1080p gaming in most cases. My recommendations are exactly what you've already suggested:

1. Try Linux. Games objectively perform better on linux than windows now, even with the compatibility layers. Windows is now the biggest bottleneck in peoples' PC builds. Debian works. I recommend choosing the KDE "flavor" of Debian instead of GNOME, it will be a more familiar experience.

2. Try the OC for the CPU and also for the RAM. My 4690K overclocked really well. Its been a long time since I've messed with that, so I'd say just find some guides online specific to Haswell.

The nice thing is that both of these recommendations are free to try. You can see if they get you back to the peformance you are happy with, and if not, then you'll know you're right to think about replacing the CPU.

These are not bad specs. You'll probably get way better performance on Linux. It's also very subjective to what game and settings you're playing on. The 4070 is only a year old...

Wrong sub. You want a Windows sub.

Theres nothing more netrunner than using linux!

Ive actually been going through the same thing recently, and after tweaking the settings Ive got it to run smoothly -

Ill paste the settings that I changed later when Im with my laptop