In the last few weeks or months, many new triple-A rated PC games have come out, games with about hardware requirements that have put many relatively old PCs in a compromise; picture it: shopping Hogwarts Legacy either Dead Island 2 for example, and it works too slow, your PC can’t handle it. Aside from the obvious thing of buying a new PC, what could you update on your hardware to make it work better?
Titles like Dead Island 2 have caused many PC gamers to find themselves in the position that they have acquired the game but that their PC is not capable of moving it in acceptable conditions to be able to enjoy it, forcing them to reduce the resolution or relax the settings. graphics settings to be able to play it moderately well… this, of course, spoils the gaming experience, and sometimes there is no other choice but to invest in update pc to be able to play properly.
What to update on PC to make games work better
Let’s start with the most obvious: Graphic card. When we talk about a PC for games, it is the component to update that will have the greatest impact on performance, since after all this PC component is in charge of rendering and displaying the images that we see on the monitor. Therefore, upgrading the PC with a new and more powerful graphics card would be the most direct solution to improve gaming performance.
However, keep in mind that upgrading your PC’s graphics card is not as simple as removing the current one and putting in the new one: you must take several factors into consideration:
- Does your power supply have enough power? Do you have the necessary PCIe connectors?
- Does the graphics card fit inside your current case? (Look at the image above: below, an RTX 2070, above, an RTX 4080… the difference in size is obvious).
- Are you going to have too much bottleneck in relation to the processor?
On this last premise, let’s go to the second point that can come to mind when your PC can’t move games decently, upgrade processor. The processor or CPU is in charge of practically everything in a PC, it is like the director that executes and distributes the tasks among all the other components, the brain of the machine. And, despite the fact that in games what influences the most is the graphics card, the processor also has a great weight when it comes to making them run satisfactorily for the user experience.
When you have an old or less powerful processor on your PC and a graphics card that is quite powerful, what we know as “bottlenecks” can occur: we mentioned before that EVERYTHING goes through the processor, so if this is too slow and not able to keep up with your graphics card, no matter how powerful your graphics card is, you’re going to have a drag on performance, so upgrading your processor can also help a lot to make games run better for you.
Of course, it also has many considerations: if you change your processor to a more modern one, make sure that the new one is compatible with your current motherboard and RAM, since otherwise it is likely that you will have to update these three things. Also make sure that your current heatsink is compatible and is sufficient to dissipate the heat it generates, or you will need to change it too. Generally, changing the PC’s processor involves changing a lot of other things.
Let’s go with the third premise: what about RAM? whatIncrease the amount or improve the speed will it make the games work better? The answer is yes, but relatively. Currently, many games already require at least 16 GB of RAM to function properly, so if you don’t have this amount, it can be a compelling reason for your PC to not be able to play games well. However, if you already have 16 GB of RAM, increasing the amount probably won’t improve gaming performance.
As for speed, it is something that can help you stretch a handful of FPS in many games, but it is not a determining factor either, such as upgrading the graphics card, for example. If we go to empirical data, in our experience, for example, changing a DDR4 RAM at 3,200 MHz for another DDR4 at 5,000 MHz can make you gain 3-4 FPS on average, an amount that as you can see is not a big deal.
To finish, the last thing we are going to tell you about is the storage unit… if you still do not have an SSD in your system (be it M.2 or even SATA) performance in games will be penalized, but more so in the loading screens and in the time you have to wait for the game to open than in the performance of the game itself. Today, an SSD is very necessary for the PC to work more “lighter”, not only in games but in everything.
