Your video card is the primary piece of hardware that will determine how fast a game will run if you play with any decent amount of "eye candy" on.
The relationship between gpu and cpu is maybe not so well known. So I'll try to give a simple example with an anology I made a long time ago that I still think is good Razz
You know those little flip books that you thumb thru and it looks like a movie playing, because each page has the same picture drawn just slightly diffrent so when you see all the pictures back to back it appears to move.
Well thats your FPS or frames per second in a game is that flip book image you see.
Now the video cards job is to draw that picture on each page (in the case of a video game its drawing the game on your monitor) and we will say its the cpu's job to turn each page so you can see the pictures change.
What happens is if you have a very strong video card it can draw those pictures so fast that the cpu cant turn the pages fast enough to keep up. Thus a bottle neck. This doesnt mean you need a new cpu to turn the pages faster it just means your not using the video card to its full power. But if its already 50-60 frames (pages) per second its not a big deal.
Here is what you CAN do in that situation tho, make the picture harder to draw. Meaning turn up all the eye candy, a higher resolution if your not at max already, higher AA, or AF filtering, all the games highest settings for draw distance, lighting, shadows ect ect. Now your giving the video card more work but not the cpu.
So you see the big benifit of a Video Card upgrade even if you dont upgrade the cpu, as if before you were forced to turn down the visual quality, with a new card chances are you can turn them up.
Thats the basic idea of it. There is more too it, the CPU is still used for more than just rendering all the frames from the video card, it has to process the games loading, and AI functions ect ect. So some games can be more cpu dependant than others. It will never hurt to have a faster cpu but the video card is definintly more important in todays games unless you have a very poor cpu currently thats bottle necking the video card at any setting and not fast enough to handle the game.
You can have a bottleneck the other way too, if you have a very fast cpu like a C2D and a old GPU (even my 7800GTX probably could get bottlnecked from a C2D) you can get a situation where the video card just is not strong enough to "draw" any faster when you raise the settings in a game but the cpu has more than enough power to handle the extra frames and its power wont be used. You will always have some sort of bottleneck one way or the other but its just a mater of keeping it to a minimal or just having a smooth running system/game.
To find wich way its going just try this:
If you can raise the visual quality settings in a game and the FPS does not go down that means your video card is not being fully used and has room left to go, when it starts to go down you found the video cards limit.
As you lower the visual quality settings and the frames per second go up and up, when you hit the point where lowering them more does not give more fps that means you found the cpus limit because the video card is drawing so fast the cpu cant "flip thru" any faster.
A benchmark like Aquamark 3 is a good example of this. its so old now that with a old video card like a Geforce 5700 you run it thru and get your score. I'll use my old system.
2.8ghz P4 and a Geforce 5700Ultra. Run the bench and get XXX score lets say 30,000
Overclock the cpu to 3.0ghz and run again... Score says the same 30,000. The video card is the limit it can draw the frames any faster.
Lower the cpu back to 2.8ghz and overclock the video card. Run the bench and get bigger numbers say 32,000
However run Aquamark3 now days with any current gpu like a 7800GTX or higher and get a big score like 100,000 overclock your video card and get 100,000 again no increase in score. Because the video card can render that old bench so easy its the cpu thats holding the system back because it cant flip thru those pages fast enough to keep up with the video card. Overclock your cpu and BOOM you get a higher score.
So Aquamark3 today to me is a great CPU benchmark instead of a video benchmark Razz I had to push my Opteron 148 to like 3.1ghz to get 100,000 with my 7800GTX To compare others can get 100,000 with a core2duo at only like 2.8ghz or 2.7ghz to show the cpu is faster and more powerfull and can keep up with the video card better.
Final note, you dont need a dual core or multi core cpu to "optimize" a 8800GTX or GTS they dont use more than one core, its all about the application and if its multithreaded or not. Its not a bad idea to have a dual core cpu, but by no means is it needed, applications to use them are still very low in number. There should be a big spike in that in the near future I would hope since dual core is pretty much the new standard for any new computer.
So just remember in an old and easy to render game like say the aquamark 3 benchmark even a 4ghz overclocked core2duo would probably bottleneck a 8800GTX, but in real life playing say Oblivion at 1920x1200 max settings, you may very well get the same performance from a core2duo @ 3ghz as you would a Athlon 64 @ 2ghz because the video card is doing all the work.
The general rule is the higher your resolution and higher your IQ settings the less impact the cpu will make on your frame rate and the more important your GPU will be.
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