I'll put in 2 cents. I game only in bootcamp. I tried to see if my old cmp (see my sig) is cpu limited in gaming and it appears not, at least in Witcher 3 CPU usage does not go over 20% in task manager. However, I have to reduce the foliage effects to get okay frame rates, which I think is GPU limited. With Moore's law pretty much dead (or modified) I don't think cpu limitation is as important as in the past for gaming. The W3680 I have is an old cpu but its hardly breaking a sweat in this game! I want to get into 3D modelling as a hobbyist. So the 1080 might be overkill. Are some of you saying that on the mac side what generation of gpu doesn't really matter that much for rendering, etc? I find that hard to believe. But you have managed to confuse me quite well...
I respect your opinion, however, if your CPU usage stuck at around 17%, that may means you are CPU limiting, that's because the game can only utilise 2 threads.
On very worst case, the game can only utilise 1 thread, that's, 8.3% on the W3680. And there may be some other background demand from the OS itself, overall CPU usage may be just 10%, however, that's a sign that you may be CPU limiting.
When we are talking about CPU limiting in gaming, 99% of the time we are talking about single core performance, not multi core performance. For W3680, 12 threads available, 1 thread only equals to 8.3%. From memory, I only see 2 games can utilise 50% of my W3690 in gaming. And most of them cannot use more than 20%, however, I can run the game from 1080 all the way up to 4K at more of less the same frame rate. That's a sign that quite a few of games are CPU limiting on my W3690.
However, this may be a very specific case on my dual 7950 CF setup. AMD's driver is very bad, they may tax the CPU more, and make my setup further CPU limiting, or I don't know if CF will increase CPU overhead as well. Anyway, I can still enjoy almost all games at stable 4K 30HZ (usually somewhere between high to max setting), my 4K TV is the 1st gen stuff, no HDMI 2.0, so 30FPS max, not ideal, but very good graphics, very enjoyable. I mainly play offline game, so no need 120FPS to against the other player (e.g. in shooting games). And most of the time I still play games in consoles, so 30FPS is actually very common for me. If require, I can always go back to 1080P 60Hz, and use super resolution to render at 1440P, that will gives me pretty good graphic and FPS. However, when I do this , I realise even though I reduce the resolution, the FPS not necessary able to stay at 60FPS, sometimes it vary between 30 to 60FPS. GPU is not 100% at all, but CPU stay at the same 17% range. Therefore, I am quite sure my 5,1 is actually CPU limiting on quite a lot of games.
4k 30FPS sure is more demanding than 1080 60FPS. On some games, disable super resolution still roughly the same result. So, I am quite sure that's my W3690 limiting the FPS, not the GPU. Since Nvidia has better driver, may be can make the system deliver better performance overall. However, by considering the Maxwell is already so powerful, most likely the 5,1 with GTX 1080 is still CPU limiting most of the time.