Does gaming heavily depend on Graphics card and RAM alone?

Good evening people.
I have a situation I need help with and as usual, I came here to ask hoping that you experts might help me make a better decision .

Okay basically.
I have an old desktop PC.
- Intel core duo, nvidia graphics card 1gb, 4gb ram, 320gb hdd

Now, I wish to be able to play the game 'Guild Wars 2' under the maximum setting.
1920 x 1600 resolution with all the shaders and high settings and all.

I am on a tight budget at the moment so, my question is;
Should I just trade in this old desktop pc and pay more for a new one with a better spec (intel core i5, nvidia graphics card 2gb, 8gb ram 500gb hdd) or can I just replace the nvidia graphics card, the hard disk drive and add the ram to 8gb to make it work?

Again, I understand that if I replace it, I will be able to play 'FUTURE GAMES' which requires higher graphics specs and stuff but, this is actually my back-up PC. At the moment, as long as it's able to play the game guild wars 2 under the highest setting, I'm happy with it. Which actually backs to my question in the thread 'Does gaming heavily depend on Graphics card and RAM alone?' because in this case, that's what I want to replace in my spare PC Desktop.

 

Gaming is mostly about the Gpu. If you get a new Gpu get the highest spec one for your PC. Desk tops are real easy to upgrade, heck if you can swap out your MB for a higher end one and you can really go to town with upgrades. 8GB of ram is plenty, I have 32GB of ram and it adds nothing to gaming. I never had an I5 CPUs, but I always thought I7s were better for gaming.

 

You'll want to purchase a new PC. Games are becoming more CPU dependent. GW2 is actually very CPU dependent.

You can build a desktop for about $700-$800. It can have Skylake i5-6600k, 8GB DDR4, GTX 950. Very nice.

 

(Intel) Quad core CPU is necessary for GW2. GPU does not need to be high end, even for highest graphics settings.

 

you can have games that are CPU heavy. it's more about finding the balance between CPU and GPU.

 

AMD graphics card are severely reliant on good CPU performance so avoid it in your current rig. I have a Core i7 5820k than can do 4.5Ghz and I also have an R9 290 and a GTX 960. In summer I downclock the CPU to 3Ghz and disable HT. The Performance of my R9 290 goes from solid 144FPS to average 95FPS to mid 70's. My GTX 960 on the other hand has the same performance and can still do 144FPS solid.

NVIDIA graphics card doesn't rely too much on the CPU to deliver its optimal performance that is why AMD suddenly has massive performance increase on DX12 compared to NVIDIA.

 

The CPU reliance might change a little once nVidia pulls together their software based asynchronous compute. Though it doesn't look ridiculously intense what they have to do in software, it'll still uses the CPU.

 

Given that NV has DX12 driver support for Fermi (which had hardware multi-queue schedulers), we might see some improvement with those old cards if NV actually bothered to write proper code for it. The chance is slim and it won't be relevant anyway though.