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I know that generally speaking for gaming performance the GPU is the primary factor which holds back performance, with everything else such as RAM/motherboard/PSU/CPU being secondary in importance to the graphics card.
But at some point the other components ARE going to be significant in holding back the whole system!
For instance nobody would be silly enough to play modern games with 512MB RAM and the very latest graphics cards (such as an HD7970) as I bet the performance increase over such a system with only 512MB but a mid range card would be non-existent! Thus it would be a "waste" for such a person to buy any high end graphics card without resolving first the system's other problems. The same point applies to other components, such as if it only had a Pentium II a current high end graphics card would be wasted on it!
So my core question is how do you determine at what point for your system is spending on extra GPU power be completely "wasted"? (also, a slightly more nuanced question is trying work out at what point might the extra graphics power not be "wasted" but would be "sub optimal" value for money, when the expenditure should then be split around graphics card and other components. As obviously a gamer shouldn't always just spend on upgrading the graphics card! But needs to balance it out)
CPUs are not bottlnecks for GPUs, its the bus. – Keltari – 2012-09-21T06:16:48.007
@Keltari, I know that GPUs rather than CPUs being the bottleneck is true in general in gaming. However, when the gap between them is so large (my old lower end CPU vs a current higher end GPU) would the CPU then become too much of a problem? Also I've heard Arma2 & TW:Shogun2 are very CPU intensive games. Thus, would a HD7850 be too much of a surplus waste on my current system? – Matthew Galloway – 2012-09-21T06:25:08.110
@slhck: sorry! I shall edit my question to try and make it more general :-) – Matthew Galloway – 2012-09-21T08:08:13.653
1I took the liberty of removing the too specific parts and reopened the question. Since you have enough network-wide reputation, feel free to come to [chat] and ask about your plans there. We have enough experts who surely want to help you select the best hardware for your situation. – slhck – 2012-09-21T08:29:38.767
@slhck thanks for reopening!! sorry about posting it a second time :-) – Matthew Galloway – 2012-09-21T08:34:56.297
@slhck: I wanted to rewrite the question last night, but it was too late for me to do it... ;) – bwDraco – 2012-09-21T14:25:58.107