One of the most important parts of a gaming PC is your graphics card or GPU. Whether you plan on playing FPS games, action-adventure games, point-and-click, or RPG you need a good GPU. The more powerful the graphics card, the better your games will look, and in today’s gaming world, some older cards won’t even be able to run the newest games.
In some scenarios, and depending on how much RAM you have, adding more RAM could increase your FPS. Games require a certain amount of memory to run. The amount of memory that games require to run can vary from game to game.
Therefore, if you want the best gaming PC, you need to have the best GPU however, sometimes even that isn’t enough as your PC might be lacking in the RAM department. Find more information below.
How Important Is The RAM?
RAM is important because your system can access data in it more quickly than it can retrieve info from your main storage disk.
You have the entire game’s data stored on your hard drive or solid-state drive, but constantly pulling it from there is inefficient. Thus, your computer moves the game information it will need to RAM in order to quickly load it.
With low RAM, your computer won’t be able to store all the game info it needs to run properly, leading to choppy frame rates and poor performance. An extreme lack of RAM could even prevent the game from working at all.
It’s important to note that dedicated video cards have their own RAM, known as vRAM. This is different from system RAM in that it’s completely focused on sending graphics to your display.
Thus, if you want to play games at high resolutions like 4K, you need a lot of vRAM. You could have 32GB of system RAM, but performance would still suffer greatly with just 2GB of video RAM in your card.
Other Components That Affect FPS
The GPU directly affects the FPS being displayed on your screen. The faster the graphics on your screen get updated, the faster FPS you will have. The CPU also increases FPS because it needs to be on par with GPU performance to prevent bottlenecks.
This shows that even though your GPU/graphics card is the main component in your computer that increases FPS, it is not the only part that matters.
The other parts of your PC can help assist your GPU so that you can squeeze the most FPS out of your game.
Your CPU does have a major role in increasing computer FPS, but you need it to work side-by-side with your GPU. Although the CPU doesn’t have as big of an impact on FPS as your GPU does, having a high-performance CPU will still aid in performance especially if you are playing a CPU-intensive game.
Many game developers build games that focus on using more power from the CPU than the GPU. Even still your GPU plays the main part in increasing FPS, but a good CPU will allow you to play these types of games at an even higher FPS and boost your performance.
While the GPU works on displaying characters, events, and movements on your screen. The CPU works in the background to make characters move, attack, and give objects properties such as collision properties, or barriers in a game.
Believe it or not, having a good cooling system in your computer can help boost FPS. This is because good cooling can allow your other PC components to work harder without overheating.
The harder and faster a computer part such as the GPU or CPU works, the more heat it produces. If the cooling system in the PC is not efficient enough to keep up with the amount of heat your PC is producing then your computer parts will start to overheat.
This creates FPS and performance drops, as well as possible damage to your system. Having a sufficient cooling system will also allow you to overclock your PC. Overclocking your PC will increase the performance of your computer and FPS by a good amount, and the better your cooling system, the higher you can overclock your PC. Thereby, boosting FPS even more.
Is More RAM Better?
As RAM allows games to load efficiently, you might think that adding more RAM will always result in better performance. However, this isn’t the case. If you have more RAM than the information you need to hold, the extra go to waste.
To help illustrate this, think about a storage container for liquid. If you need to store a gallon of water, but only have a half-gallon container, you can’t keep everything in one place like you want to. But if you have a 10-gallon container that’s only storing one gallon of water, most of that container is going to waste.
Is Clock Speed Important?
In addition to DDR, you’ll also see a RAM stick’s clock cycles listed on its product page. These are offered in megahertz and represent how many cycles the RAM can perform every second. For instance, 2666MHz RAM runs 2.666 billion cycles each second.
As you’d expect, the higher this number, the faster the RAM and the smoother your experience. However, it’s not a drastic improvement. Faster RAM is better than slower, but in most cases, it’s not noticeable.
The DDR generation and the clock cycles are correlated; you won’t see ultra-fast numbers on ancient DDR2 RAM, for example. Because of this, as long as you stick to the current standard, you know you’ll have RAM that runs at a decent speed.
If you mix sticks of RAM with different clock cycles, it will all run at the lowest frequency. Your motherboard may also limit the available speed.
You’ll also sometimes see a series of numbers listed on RAM, such as 5-9-5-23. These are called timings and illustrate how much latency the RAM has when responding to requests. Most people don’t need to worry about these numbers; capacity and DDR generation are more important.
Conclusion
FPS or Frames Per Second is the number of times in which the screen refreshes itself to a certain time and even though it is affected by RAM a lot of other factors contribute to FPS.
These factors include the CPU, and GPU of your machine as well as factors such as temperatures and cooling of your machine which can affect its performance.
