Why upgrade your graphics card?

In our post above we've shown you how to install a graphics card, but you might be wondering just why you would want to do that. The main reason is that it's usually the most cost effective way to upgrade your PC and improve gaming performance. Hopefully this post will go some way to explaining the importance of the graphics card nestled inside your PC!

Your graphics card is essentially responsible for handling the image that is sent to your screen and in particular it deals with any 3D graphics. With the graphics of modern PC games looking better and better with each new release, these games put a lot of strain on your graphics card. Most modern processors have multiple cores and run fast enough to handle any current game. Instead, it is usually a slow graphics card, not a slow processor, that will hold you back from running that latest game smoothly.

Provided your PC is not too old, upgrading your graphics card is much more likely to give you a noticeable increase in gaming performance than upgrading your processor will. It is also likely to be a lot cheaper! Upgrading your processor usually involves changing other internal components of your PC, such as the motherboard or RAM and can therefore be an expensive undertaking. On the other hand, installing a new graphics card simply requires you to remove the old one and plug a new one in! With the pace that technology moves buying a good value graphics card today will likely get you a card that runs a lot faster than anything more than a year or so old and you should benefit immediately from the change.

So now you know why you should upgrade your graphics card, you'll probably want to look in to what new graphics card you should choose. Why not take a look at our article about choosing a graphics card to help you decide.