Is CPU or GPU More Important for Gaming? A Complete Guide

A balanced gaming PC is the key to avoiding frustrating performance issues. If you're not sure to upgrade your CPU or GPU first, I've got you covered.

Check out our complete playlist for more Gaming PC tips.

What is the CPU's role when gaming?

The CPU handles most of the game logic. This means where things are in the world and how they react to your input. So, as you're playing the game, what should happen is run on the CPU.

A CPU intensive game tends to be a game with a lot happening, such as:

• Factorio
• Realtime strategy games like Starcraft

Other online games are usually pretty CPU intensive as well, such as Dota or CS:GO because they need to handle multiple elements from different players all at the same time and have to be very responsive in doing that.

What is the GPU's role in gaming?

The GPU usually handles all of the visual effects. So, this is the fancy explosions and the nice lighting and the great shadows you'll see in a lot of new games.

The most GPU intensive games usually are the most recent games as they take advantage of the latest hardware features of graphics cards. These can include:

• The Last of Us Remastered
• Spider-Man and Spider-Man Miles Morales or Spider-Man 2
• Call of Duties, most of any of the recent ones
• Cyberpunk 2077

So, which one is more important?

Unfortunately, there's no one answer as each gamer is different and each gaming setup is also very different. If you're playing a real-time strategy game, each component is going to be more important in different circumstances.

When the GPU is more important

• If your gaming PC plays at a higher resolution, like 4K

The GPU will be more important because everything you render will be at a much higher resolution. You need a much more powerful graphics card to keep up with what your game is doing.

• For high resolution games or more detailed games

If you're playing on a 4K gaming monitor, you'll definitely need a better GPU to keep up with all the pixels on that monitor.

• Playing a game like Cyberpunk 2077

The real-time ray tracing will require the latest and greatest GPUs, such as an RTX 5090.

When the CPU is more important

If you're playing a lot of competitive games or strategy games, the CPU will be more important.

This is because it can handle things faster. So, you'll have a lower latency for the game logic to handle.

Or if there's a lot more entities on screen, your CPU can handle a lot more of them when it's faster.

How do you avoid bottlenecks?

The best way is to make sure your CPU and GPU aren't too far out of date of each other. A really old CPU with a really new GPU will be usually bottlenecked by the CPU and vice versa. An old graphics card will hold back your brand new CPU if it's too slow.

Identifying which part is bottlenecking your PC

A way to specifically identify which part might be bottlenecking your gaming PC would be to open up a tool like hardware info and look for the GPU wait time or the CPU wait time in the detailed settings. 

This will tell you which one is rendering faster, your CPU or GPU. And if one is significantly longer than the other, that means that one is bottlenecking your PC.

Balancing your CPU and GPU

To balance your CPU and GPU better, sometimes you might need to turn down your graphics settings if your GPU is the bottleneck to improve the performance.

If your CPU is the bottleneck, sometimes you'll need to adjust in-game settings such as entity detail or number of entities when the game supports it.

Looking to the future

When looking to the future, you should usually prioritize having a great graphics card as it appears as though graphics card generations are slowing down year to year. 

Also:

• A lot more games are a lot more graphically intensive, adding in some features such as ray tracing, DLSS, and other fancy graphical effects.
• Your CPU tends to still have improvements year to year and can be upgraded more often than your GPU can.

Still not sure which combination is right for you? 

At Apex Gaming PCs, we build perfectly balanced systems tailored to your exact needs.  Check out our custom gaming rigs today and find the perfect CPU and GPU pairing.

Written By William Wilson

Photo Credits: Pavan Bhakta