A gaming machine has a few important parts. The CPU and GPU are among them. They are also the costliest components you will ever purchase to put a gaming rig together. But, which one is more important when it comes to gaming? Is it the CPU, which sounds like the most important part of a computer, or the GPU, which sounds like the part involved with processing graphics vital to games? Let’s find out.
CPU: What Does it do in Games?
A CPU has a lot of tasks when it comes to gaming. All kinds of complex calculations are mostly carried out. Let’s take a small example. Say you are playing Call of Duty. The CPU will be concerned with calculating the projectile of every bullet you fire.
While this is a fairly generic description of how computing is carried out, there is no definite borderline in between the tasks carried out by the CPU and GPU. We can list ten things that are carried out by either of the components, and anyone can argue otherwise. This is because these divisions of the workload is carried out by the Operating System. The OS intelligently divides the workload to achieve the most optimum performance.
But, there are some basic differences that can be confirmed. For this, let us understand the difference between a CPU and a GPU.
When it comes to gaming workloads, a CPU can be seen as a fast processor which processes data with very high accuracy. But, it does not have a lot of storage to process more and more data. CPUs have three levels of cache, and each lower level is slower than the one preceding it. The amount cache ranges from a few kilobytes in L1 and L2 to megabytes in L3. After this, the next fastest storage the CPU can access is the system memory or the DRAM. This memory is significantly slower than the three levels of cache and is also limited by physical barriers such as distance.
In the past, games were solely run by CPUs. They did everything from all the complex calculations to rendering the output. But, as games became more and more graphics-intensive, we needed to hand over that task to a separate chip altogether, which we now know as the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).
What does a GPU do in Games?
To answer this question, let us quickly look at the working of a GPU. A GPU, unlike CPU isn’t as fast as a CPU. But, it can handle large amounts of data at once, making it ideal for repetitive workloads like rendering and machine learning. This is why GPUs are also widely used in password guessing workloads where we need less accuracy, but more cases to hit the correct combination.
So, after years of fine-tuning, the GPU has become highly optimized to control the display output of a system. While you can still theoretically play less intensive games like Chess just using a CPU, the modern AAA games need a GPU to push out hyper-realistic frames multiple times a second. Most of the basic processing, like handling the AI, processing the input, working out the projectiles, etc. are still handled by the CPU to date.
Which is More Important: CPU or GPU?
If you ask me, I would vote for both of them. But, if you are looking for a strict answer, the CPU is a clear winner because it run games without the need for a GPU in the first place. But, modern AAA games need the power of the latest graphics cards in the market. So, gaming without a GPU still remains a dream.