Will a graphics card upgrade help my stuttering timeline playback?

By the way, I looked at that Bottlenecker site. Even the GTX 1050 Ti still caused a 22% bottleneck (The Bottlenecker considers anything 10% or more to be "significantly bottlenecked"). A GTX 1060 - either the 3GB version or the 6GB version - would have been a nice match for that i7-4790 CPU; however, the GTX 1060s cost way more than they should because of the cryptocurrency mining craze.

And when that "bottleneck" rating approaches 100%, that is when the CPU-only performance starts becoming significantly or even severely degraded.

Actually, yes, that underpowered GPU can - and does - slow down CPU-only performance significantly, even in apps that make no use of the GPU whatsoever. And although there are some 2GB GT 730s that use a newer GPU with 384 CUDA cores, most 2GB GT 730s are actually a rebrand of the GT 430 from 2010, with only 96 CUDA cores. And the GT 430 itself was a lousy GPU even back then, and is a complete joke today.

And I did test my main PC, with an i7-4790K CPU and various cards (the cheapest card I had was a GT 730 with 384 CUDA cores and 1GB of GDDR5 SGRAM) - and the lower-end card proved not only itself sluggish, but also severely hurt the system's CPU-only, non-GPU-accelerated performance. In fact, its CPU-only score with the GT 730 was almost as slow as a same-generation dual-core i3 CPU with a GTX 750 Ti. This is because the low-end GPUs actually misuse the hardware CPU resources (addresses) that higher-end GPUs hardly touch.

Hi,

The biggest factors in playback will be the hard drive speed where the media is located, and the actual codes used.  If you have 4k h.264 media on a 5400rpm drive, that will cause major issues in playback because the compression is very high - the system already needs a great deal of power just the read it, then its sending that through a slow pipeline because of the hard drive.  After that is considered then you would look at the graphics card to help speed up rendering previews of your sequences.  Any red bar over clips in your timeline will require rendering first to see it at full speed.  Your CPU may have issues with 4k due to the cores/clock/cache combo, but you can help it along with having your media on a SSD or raid configured HDD.  That will help the pipeline flow faster.  Also consider transcoding any highly compressed 4k footage, (h.264, mp4) into an intermediate file format like ProRes, Cineform or DNxHD before hand.  This will put less strain on the processor and can help playback and rendering.  Just keep in mind the it will require more storage space. 

It would be a good idea to upgrade the GPU when you can, but that is more or accelerated effects, and increased render/export speeds or then straight playback.

Hope it helps.