What is the roll of... Graphics Cards and RAM. When gaming????

Question

I think graphics cards are for looks, and RAM is for smooth gameplay.(nonchoppy)

Answer 1

The video card can be considered as an assitant to the processor. Technically speaking, you dont actually need a video card to play anything. But whatever your video card can not process itself is dumped onto the CPU. Given the massive amount of calculations many modern games require just for the AI (let alone physics, sound, per-loading the next area, handling scripted events, etc.) a video card is pretty much a necessity unless youve got 4 independant processors and dont mind installing the individual video files (OpenGL, vertex and pixel shader, etc.) which would normally come installed on the card you purchase to make things easier on you.

RAM is used for just about everything. There are 3 levels of data storage and they are:

Level 1: This is the cache built into the processor itself. The cache is relatively small and simply holds data that the processor is about to use. While your CPU is working on piece A, piece B is loaded into the Cache for faster access.

Level 2: This your RAM. Everything you use is loaded into RAM and moved into the Cache when needed. The RAM has a direct line to the processor and is faster than level 3. Thus, if you dont have enough RAM you will see noticeable drops in performance as your computer has to swap data from RAM to hard disk and vice-versa.

Level 3: This is your hard drive. If you dont have enough RAM than your computer will use whats called "Virtual Memory". This is basically an area of your hard drive set aside to swap files around that may still be of use to the CPU. Since the hard drive is mechanical (a spinning disk), there are drawbacks to using this swap space