So I've had couple of different kinds of PC builds over the years, and while some builds I've not had the "top of the line" GPU (always some 70 tier card or something, but sometimes 80), I always seem to have problem with CPU performance in games, despite never having "budget" tier cpu in any of my builds, always mid-high or high-low tier, and my current is high-high from couple of years back.

So how come I get this feeling, that everytime I've played on PC, all the time my performance issues have mostly been because of CPU? I get this feeling I've always had some kind of "bloated" windows install, like too many programs or games installed, and that eventually it just always becomes slower, and I don't think it's to do with "background" processes or programs running in background.

What's the cause of this, is windows registry thing still a thing, or why I feel even in win 7 and win 10 era , the total number of programs installed seem to cause performance issues? It feels like I'm constantly CPU bound in my gaming, regardless of era of PC gaming I'm on.

Is there a way to optimize this shit, without doing some "fresh install" shit? I don't wanna be cpu bound anymore, I wanna be able to get good cpu performance in my gaming.