CPU vs Graphics Card: What to upgrade? nVidia says graphics!

OK, they are not the most objective source, but graphics processormanufacturer nVidia does make a pretty convincing argument for spendingmore money on a computer’s graphics card and less on the mainprocessor—in certain conditions.

I met with them last week to hear their case, and today they launched a new siteto help people calculate how much polygon muscle they need. The gist:Often you can get better performance for the same amount of money ifyou spend more on the graphics processing unit (GPU) and less on thecentral processing unit (CPU).

Piclens:

Photo by Piclens

Now, the GPU is inconsequential if all you do are tasks like e-mailing,light Web surfing, and preparing documents in Word and Excel. But insome cases, the GPU makes a big difference. 3D video games are a given,but intensive graphics are creeping into many other applications. Google Earth,for example, now provides 3D views of urban landscapes, and my pooriMac nearly overheated trying to render a view of downtown Manhattan. Alittle less power-intensive, but maybe even more fun, is PicLens—aweb browser plug-in that lets you navigate photo sites like Flickr orGoogle’s image search in 3D, similar to how you flip though albumcovers in iTunes.

I agree with Nvidia, today graphics are more important. I have a 7900GT, and at the time, it was a nice card. Today it is just average. My CPU is a dual core 2.4 GHz AMD Opteron. When I play a game such as Call of Duty 4, I have most details maxed out but I still get some slowness. I do live CPU usage monitoring during the game and I notice that the game never gets above 85% CPU usage. Today it seems all a CPU does in a game is physics/movement, scoring, input actions, and in-game maintenance such as whether or not an object is created or removed, or the environment (wind, sky, weather, etc). Going quad core on a gaming computer is plain stupid, a waste of money. Going quad SLi or Crossfire, well, thats a different story.