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Which is better for good gaming?
Will only buying a very good expensive GPU (Graphics Card) ensure a good gaming experience? Friends say that you dont need to buy a new processor, a good graphics card is enough.
I like surreal 3D games most.
I have one 1GB DDR2 RAM and 2.0GHz Dual Core Processor, 7200 RPM sata Hard disk.
Whilst many people will tell you that a graphics card is the most important component for gaming, it is not strictly true. The truth is that the balance of components is the most important.
In your case, anything but a modest graphics card will be overkill for your system. Even if you had a top of the range graphics card, you wouldn't get much out of it, because you are severely limited by 1GB of (relatively slow) RAM.
Should you upgrade your memory, your CPU will become the limiting factor - and in certain games, the CPU will prove even more of a bottleneck than your RAM.
A single 7200rpm SATA drive isn't particularly speedy either, but you are some way off it becoming a limiting factor. Faster HDDs will enable you to load levels faster, but have far less impact on frame-rates and graphical quality.
However, in a system where all components are of a similar generation, the first component to upgrade would be your graphics card. As a rule of thumb, I might suggest you keep your components within one generation of each other.
Your PC would be regarded as obsolete, but that isn't necessarily a reason to write it off. What is does mean is that buying a gfx card one generation ahead of your current one, doubling (or perhaps even quadrupling) your RAM and upgrading your CPU by one generation would be cheaper and would yield a far greater improvement than buying a latest-gen gfx card.
Usually the graphics card is the most important part, but there are some very CPU-intensive games out there. Very important is the resolution you're playing at, the higher the resolution the better the graphics card should be. You don't need a very expensive card to play at medium to high settings at a moderate resolution.
With a 2GHz dual-core it probably does not make any sense to put a high-end graphics card into it, but combined with a midrange card it should be enough for most games.
RAM is only limiting if you have not enough and the OS is forced to page out parts of your game to the hard drive. About 2-4 GB are recommended for current games, more will most likely not improve the performance significantly. Your 1GB are not enough for most current games, if you upgrade anything you'll have to upgrade the RAM as well.
Rather than give you a fish, how about I teach you to fish. The best one for performance is...
It depends.
Because the best is whatever is slowing down your computer most, and making the other components wait. There's a program built into Windows you can use for a rough measurement of what is slowing your computer down: Task Manager. Give your comp the ol' three finger salute, ctrl-alt-del, and open up the task manager, and switch to the Performance Tab
You'll see:
Now, leave the task manager running and start up whatever game you want to play better. Turn the settings up a bit, then play for a min. Repeat until you're not happy with your performance. Play like that for a minute so the computer can measure it, and remember to listen for the disk with your Mark-1 Human Ears, if you need to. Then alt-tab/close the game and quickly go back to the Task Manager, where you'll see the history of your recent playing. Whichever components are being used near or above capacity are the ones you can replace to improve your performance. And if they are all green, but your play experience was still choppy/slow/poor quality, then you probably need to replace the component we didn't measure: your graphics card.
(In the case of having to listen for your disk, you don't want it to be working all the time while you play, but that could be a symptom of not having enough memory, so upgrade memory first if it was all being used and the disk was always working.)
There are more involved ways to measure, but if its all you have, the simple Task Manager will get the job done.
In short:
Don't guess, don't have us guess, Measure.
GPU, CPU, RAM, Hard-drive.
In that order.
Rule of thumb: maximum age difference of 2 generations between components.
Though not a question here, hard-drive is the most subtle performance factor to observe: you'll have jaw dropping moments when you exchange a new one against a 4 year old drive. It's the most non-linear hardware upgrade experience among all of them.
The second I experienced from switching from dual-core to quad-core.
Shader power is mostly nice to have, once you have warped beyond 50-60 FPS (again, very subjective issue), and a top-notch GPU brings a lot of horsepower in terms of shaders.
You can turn down effects and achieve more or less playability, but you can't turn down the heat of the game, where CPU kicks in, showing everyone who's da boss.
When the s**t hits the fan, it's the CPU that will save your neck.
The major source of slowdowns is none of what you listed -- it's the hard drive. Fetching data from mechanical disks takes roughly 1,000,000 times as much time as loading from cache does.
Get a Solid State Drive for your operative system and games if you can. It is the single best upgrade you can make.
The second most limiting factor in gaming is, again, none of what you listed -- internet connection. It's not as much a matter of raw speed, even though all the autoupdating systems make it worthwile, as it is of connection quality. If your latency is too variable or if you lose packets, your multiplayer experience will just be bad. Those matter more than your raw ping/latency measure, because constant lag can be compensated within limits so long as your network is reliable enough.
The graphics card, the ram and the cpu are certainly important when measuring performance -- but they only matter when they're not enough. If the current level fits in 300 MB of ram, having 2 GB or 8 GB doesn't really make a difference. If the game is designed to run at 60 fps, it doesn't matter if your cpu can run 70 or 200 updates per second. Finally, if your gfx card can render 9,001 fps at worst, all of that wasted on a 60 Hz display.
Obviously, computers are supposed to last, so there is value to maximize the period of time for which it is good enough -- the best way to ensure that is getting the bestest hardware available today.
Just make sure you keep the full picture in view.
