It’s no surprise, then, that serious gamers spend hours researching the latest GPU technology, and they often upgrade their GPUs on a regular basis.

Prices and availability of products discussed were accurate at time of publication, but are subject to change.įor many people, gaming is the most hardware intensive task that you will ask your PC to perform. After you know what you’re looking for, you can head over to Newegg’s GPU pageto pick out the best one for your needs.

The guide below should help when choosing the right graphics card. Knowing the basics of how they operate and the differences between them can help make that decision easier. GPUs are important, but how do you know which one to choose? There is a wide selection of GPU options available from a variety of manufacturers, and it might not be immediately clear which best fits your needs. GPUs can also efficiently run other processes that involve manipulating lots of data in parallel, which makes them useful for some applications outside of gaming as well. Today’s GPUs are very good at processing large amounts of image information and performing parallel tasks, making them incredibly fast at not only displaying text and graphics in windowed GUIs, but also at processing the complex 3D graphics required for modern gaming experiences. This became more important as graphical user interfaces (GUIs), found in more modern operating systems such as Windows, became more popular. Many general-purpose CPUs didn’t excel at performing these kinds of processes, and so “graphics accelerators” were created to handle some of that specialized work that the CPU was undertaking.

The data was maintained in special memory spaces called “frame buffers,” and was then transferred to the display. In the early days of PCs, the CPU was responsible for translating information into images. The more powerful the GPU (sometimes referred to as a graphics card) the more information can be calculated and displayed in a shorter time, and the better your gameplay experience will be overall. In other words, when you’re playing a game, the GPU is doing most of the heavy lifting. The GPU consists of an additional processor that takes data from the CPU, and translates it into images that can be rendered on your display. Next to the central processing unit (CPU), the graphics processing unit (GPU) has the most impact on a gaming PC’s performance.

Graphics card comparison