What plays a bigger role in gaming on a computer, Processor or Video card?

I dont know too much about computers but i do know that mine has a low end video card and processor and if i was going to get a new processor or video card to run a game better, would i put more money into the processor or more money into the video card? Example: World of warcraft gets very choppy, when alot is going on, and has what is considered low FPS, that has to do with the video card, but then what is the processors role?|||You want a Balanced system.



depending on which game you're playing, either the graphics card may be more important or the processor or sometimes even both.







i would suggest having a slightly better graphics card than the processor.







newer games these days are getting more in-def and the quality of the image is going higher and most if not all of the games that i play are highly graphics card dependent.

most are 25% load on the CPU and 87-99% load on the GPU (graphics card) with the exception of games made by DICE which includes battlefield bad company 2 and the upcoming medal of honor which is 80%cpu and 97% GPU



FPS (first person shooter) games are mainly/mostly GPU dependent

RTS (real time strategy) games are mainly/mostly CPU dependent but use the GPU to render pretty images as well



so go to www.tomshardware.com and read their articles, or even post this question in their forum. I highly recommend it.



Hope this helps





aLs0 just to answer your question:



I consider low FPS anything under your monitor's refresh rate which is either 64hz,74hz,75hz,120hz,240hz or anything inbetween but i would consider anything >50FPS good and <20FPS to be unplayable and the all-too-well-known "laggy"



the processor makes decisions like how the character and the strategies and the probabilities play out in WOW and tells the graphics card WHAT to display. this is why when alot is going on that it gets choppy/laggy so it's your processor's fault not your graphics card's.

on the other hand, try purposely making it so that not alot is going on and turn the settings all the way up. if it lags then it's your video card's fault. make sense?



also i suggest buying a new video card AND a processor (make sure the new processor can fit into the slot that you have)

so go to www.tomshardware.com or google and search "best graphics cards for the money [month] 2010" and "best gaming processor for the money [month] 2010"



what video card & processor do u have?|||the CPU could be seen as the brain which is computing. The GFX card the eyes. The trick here is that a tird party graphics car also has an on-board graphics processing unit which takes a big load off your computer when compared to an integrated processing unit. It all depends on your CPU. Does your CPU far exceeed the recommended system requirementss? If it does then a better and faster GFX card would be where I would go. Try this site http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyr… and have it look at your computer when it gets done scanning then you can click on the recommended tab and see how your hardware/software fares. If your CPU is substandard then I would first upgrade that. The GFX card is what creates the eye candy so go with that. If during the game your task manager is reporting 100% CPU then possibly a GFX card will lower that. A good FPS is around 125FPS. Slow taking in the past ten years to today would be 30. SOme games could make that even crawl to 20 or less.