I Build and Review PCs: Don't Make This Upgrade Mistake

There are a few ways to boost your gaming PC's performance, but upgrading the components, especially the graphics card or GPU, is one of the key ways to unlock faster frame rates, higher-quality visuals and higher resolutions. However, you can't always be certain that a GPU upgrade alone will give you the performance lift you're after. For gaming, other factors can hold your system back, and one of the big culprits is actually the central processor. Understanding CPU bottlenecks, how you can run into them and how you can work around them can help you unlock greater performance gains.

With gaming, your CPU and GPU both have important tasks on their own and work together to complete the overall job of smooth gaming. Put simply, your CPU figures out what needs to happen in the game. It calculates things like physics and enemy AI, then tells the GPU to get to work. The GPU figures out where everything is going to go within the virtual space of the game and what it's all going to look like. It then sends that out to your TV or monitor.

You can think of it like a restaurant. A waiter (the CPU) seats guests and takes orders, then passes those orders to the kitchen. The cooks in the kitchen (the GPU) whip up the food for the guests. Ideally, the cooks finish the food in the right amount of time so the waiter can bring it to the guests (your monitor, in this case). Ideally, the waiter isn't waiting for the cooks, and the cooks aren't waiting for the waiter. When it's all timed correctly, your monitor gets a steady stream of fully rendered frames to create smooth on-screen motion. All the guests get their food on time, in other words.