RAM vs Video cards?

[caliban7]

I was curious as to which makes a bigger difference in gaming, more RAM or a stronger graphics card. I'm running a good setup now but was wondering which would be better to upgrade. Also I wanted to know if graphics cards with larger built in memory (ex. 1gb radeon 7770 vs 2gb 7770) are really worth the increased price. Thanks!

 

[Supernova1138]

The GPU will make the most difference. RAM won't make a huge difference unless you have a very small amount of it eg. 2GB. If you have a very low amount of RAM, the game has to go to the hard drive to grab data, and that will hurt performance a lot.

As for RAM on the video card, for some games having more than 1GB will make a difference, especially on higher resolutions with lots of AA and/or if the game has high resolution texture packs. For a card in the class of the 7770 though, it generally is not worthwhile to get the 2GB version, as the 7770 isn't fast enough to really take advantage of more than 1GB of video memory. For the 7850 on up, you definitely do want to have at least 2GB of video memory now, as lot of games have been coming out with high resolution texture packs lately, and 1GB of video memory isn't enough for those high res textures if you are trying to run a game at 1080p.

 

[caliban7]

So all in all, the GPU is the most important aspect of a computer in terms of gaming? Or is it a combination of CPU and GPU?

 

[The Stealthinator]

Actually it is a combination of a few things that are required to do processing for gaming - CPU, HD, GPU, RAM. If CPU or HDD is slow, your game won't load fast as the disk access speed is limited, if GPU is slow, game won't perform well on higher settings, if you don't have enough RAM, the game won't be able to load at all... so there a few factors to consider. Hope this helps

 

[renz496]

adding ram will not add more frame rates so yes strongetr gpu is what you want if you want better performance in games. as for the gpu memory it depends on your monitor resolution. with increase of resolution the usage of memory will increase as well as because there are more pixels to push. 1gb is quite plenty even for 1080p if you dont push any setting that require lots of memory such as anti aliasing.

also you need to becareful when upgrading your gpu so you're not end up your cpu not bottlenecking your gpu

 

[bystander]

Why don't you list your system spec's. Depending on what you have, you may find different parts will help more than the next.

 

[caliban7]

Ok, at the moment I'm running an A8-5500 with 8 Gb RAM, 1Tb HDD, and a Radeon HD 7560. It runs great and plays games really well, but in the future I was planning on upgrading the graphics card to a Radeon 7770. I just wanted to know beforehand what would be the best upgrade to get (I assumed I was good on RAM but I didn't know how much of a factor it played when running games).

 

[bystander]

As long as you have 4GB of RAM, your graphics card will be the bigger upgrade. If you run into too little ram, things can quickly fall a part, resulting a lot of slow downs and even crashes.

 

[af793ads]

Check my Signature

 

[caliban7]

As long as you have 4GB of RAM, your graphics card will be the bigger upgrade. If you run into too little ram, things can quickly fall a part, resulting a lot of slow downs and even crashes.

I figure that was the case, but on some games like BF3 or Skyrim they recommend about 4 to 6 Gb RAM for smooth gameplay, so i wasn't sure how much RAM was needed to play on higher settings. 8Gb should be plenty, I'll just invest in the Radeon 7770 for now.
Thanks for the advice everybody!