Intel Q9450 vs Phenom 9850 - ATI HD3870 X2

[gosh]

both are extreme cases, but with nowadays graphics cards you reach the CPU limit far more often then the GPU limit, meaning that potential of your graphics card is unused.

if the game is bottlenecked by the processor. is that processor working at 100% then?

I didn't understand your "+-" thing.

There will always be some waiting for the cpu and the gpu. do you mean that too? of course if some hardware is slower and is used much than this will be the MAIN bottleneck. if you have a game that just draws one pixel but this pixel is very complicated to calculate. The the video card could render like 100 000 FPS or something like that. But if the cpu needs 0,1 second to calculate the pixels position it will be 10 FPS. Still, the video card is going to take 1/100 000 seconds for each frame. Total time is 1/10 + 1/100 000