How do computer components affect video games?

S

Spectrum Sam

New Member
Hello,

I am currently taking an I.C.T. course and have been asked to gather information regarding main computer components such as processors, RAM, hard disk drives and clock rate and how they affect video games.

So far I have been able to provide a detailed explanation as to how processors, RAM and Clock Rate function(s) and how they affect a game's performance.

I would appreciate any detailed information you can provide regarding the functions of the main components of a computer and how they can change/affect a game's performance.

Links to pages with similar information will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much in advance,

Spectrum Sam

TL;DR - What do the main components of a computer do and how to they change the way a game plays?

I have posted this topic in the General Computer Discussion forum to ensure I receive a reply. Forgive me if this is classed as off-topic, I will learn from my mistakes if I have made any (and have been notified of my mistakes).
 
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Hard drive speed will affect games in terms of loading speed. For example, you're playing single player campaign and you start a new chapter in the game. If you have a slow 5400 rpm hard drive it'll take a long time to load the new level where as if you have the game installed on an SSD, the level would load much faster.

The video card will affect gaming performances the most. A faster video card is going to give you more frames per second in the game. Video cards also determine whether you can use DX 10 or DX 11 affects. For example, if you have an old Nvidia FX 5500, you're not going to be able to run any DX10 or DX11 affects.
 
Hey Sam, you forgot to mention the favorite component of all gamers, the VIDEO CARD. Latest processor + Large RAM + Great Motherboard + lousy Video Card = Terrible Gameplay.
 
It depends on the game that you play, as to how much components will affect performance.

A game with lots of individual "things" or very large areas, or densely populated areas (as in a lot of "things" in an area) will use a lot of memory. Each of those individual "things" will use up several blocks of memory. You will have the game itself (at least a few hundred MB) in memory, and then each of those 1 or 2 MB, which, in terms of modern memory where at least 2GB is standard, a couple of MB doesn't sound like a lot, but when you have hundreds, sometimes thousands of "things" at once, they add up and with a low capacity, or slow memory that can't clear out RAM and fill it with the new data fast enough, it will bring the game to a crawl, or make it so you can't even play it.

Your CPU will have to be processing all of the data that will be going into memory before it gets there, it will have to be processing the physics (there is an exception to this, will explain in the next paragraph about video cards), AI, if you are online, it will have to process information from other people. Because it must do so much, it goes without saying that a faster CPU is better than a slow one for gaming. But it isn't just clock speed that affects performance. Most games now are programmed for multi core processors, and will use, for most games, 3 seperate threads, so having a tri or quad core processor will yield even better results in games, because more work will be able to be done.

The video card is the main one for modern games though, because it does all of the 3D processing, so it creates the 3D objects, all of the lighting effects, shading, tesselation is starting to move in more and more (will explain later), on Nvidia cards after the 8xxx series cards, they have Physx support which takes the physics processing from the CPU to a Physx chip on the video card, which greatly reduces load on the CPU and in games which support Physx, massively improve performance, and even improve the physics, by making everything behave more realistically.3D processing could be done on the CPU, but a Graphics card is immensely more powerful than a CPU is, and is designed to process the data that comes with 3D processing.

I just mentioned tesselation, which is, in the simplest terms, layers of triangles. Everything in games which have got heavy tesselation are made up of a lot of triangles, which when you are far away are few, but as you get closer, more and more appear to give a much greater level of detail. It makes 3D objects much more complex and realistic and not as flat as they would be without tesselation.

A few videos that can help visualise why the graphics card is better at the job and how Physx makes a difference

GPU vs CPU:

[YT]0udMBdo0Rac[/YT]

Physx:

[YT]-cnp97EaW68[/YT]

[YT]w0xRJt8rcmY[/YT]
 
Thank you very much for your helpful information! I feel stupid for forgetting the video card. If you had not known yourself to mention the video card I would be struggling right now.

Once again I greatly appreciate your help and will use this information to get my work done!
 
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