Provided you have a good enough CPU, your graphics card is going to be the single biggest component affecting your gaming performance. Essentially, the GPU should be the most expensive component of your gaming build.

This isn't to say that you should break the bank to get a graphics card. We also want to dispel a myth that you'll need to upgrade your GPU every year or every other year, just because new graphics cards come out at that cadence. A video card that you buy today will not magically get slower in the future (if anything, it may even slightly improve with driver updates). As a matter of fact, the GeForce GTX 660, which came out five years ago, can still play the overwhelming majority of modern games with acceptable frame rates. You just won't be able to crank up the graphical bells and whistles as high as you might like.

What graphics card should you get, though? That really depends on your budget and desires. We've put together an in-depth GPU buyer's guide where we've rounded up all the modern graphics cards to help.

If you want to max out most of your games at 1080p (the most common gaming resolution) with consistent frame rates above 30 FPS, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 and AMD RX 570 will do the job. They are also baseline GPUs for VR. The more powerful GeForce GTX 980, 1060, and Radeon RX 580 graphics cards are great for 1080p gaming as well, but they are also competent cards for handling the more demanding 1440p resolution. For better performance at 1440p, you'll want a GTX 1070 or AMD's upcoming RX Vega 56. If you want to go all in and try your hand at 4K, we'd recommend going with at least the GTX 1080 or AMD's upcoming RX Vega 64, but to be honest, 2160p is extremely taxing on hardware; you'll likely want a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, if not two of them, as it is the fastest gaming graphics cardonthemarkettoday.

If you don't need to game with your settings maxed out, a GTX 1050 Ti or an RX 560 are good bang-for-the-buck cards for your medium-to-high settings needs. For systems solely focused on non-graphically demanding games like League of Legends, Dota 2, and CS:GO (which are among the most popular PC games today), more affordable options like the GTX 1050 or RX 550 will do fine.

AMD vs Nvidia

Once you've figured out your GPU price range, the next logical question to ask yourself is, "Do I go with Nvidia or AMD?" As it stands right now, each vendor has its strengths and weaknesses, but the hardware community generally gives Nvidia the nod over AMD for better and more consistent driver updates. Nvidia also currently enjoys a lead in the performance-per-watt architecture category (that is to say, the company is able to deliver greater performance with less power). That means Nvidia cards are generally able to run cooler and quieter. Nvidia also offers a strong suite of features like GeForce Experience, which allows you to quickly enable optimal playable game settings, and Nvidia ShadowPlay, which allows you to easily capture in-game video. AMD is generally seen as offering a slightly better dollar-to-performance ratio, meaning you get pretty good bang-for-the-buck if performance is what you seek. Of course, graphics cards are always evolving and comparisons are going to vary on a situational basis. Like the iOS vs Android debate, both sides have their fervent fanboys and pitchforks. Luckily for you, both companies make great graphics cards and you can't really go too wrong either way.

But how do you recognize what makes a great graphics card? There are a couple things to look for. Both Nvidia and AMD use parallel processing cores for their GPUs. Nvidia refers to its cores as "CUDA" cores and AMD calls its cores "stream processors." The higher amount is generally a telltale sign of a card's quality. Like what we said about CPU core count, however, you can only compare numbers within the same family. This means you can't effectively compare CUDA cores against stream processors. You should also look at a card's base and boost clocks, which generally dictate the frequency, or speed, at which a card runs.

The amount of video RAM (VRAM) a card has is generally another indication of a card's quality tier. Again, the more you have, the better the card. Since VRAM, or the frame buffer (as it's also commonly known), is responsible for loading a game's textures, the higher the resolution you're gaming at, the more textures it has to push. VRAM therefore indirectly dictates what resolution each card should run at. Generally speaking, 2-4GB of VRAM is good for gaming at 1080p (HD), 4-8GB of VRAM is good for 1440p gaming, and you'll want six or more GB of VRAM to effectively game at 3840x2160 (4K).

Like CPUboss.com, if you can't decide between two GPUs, there is a similar website for graphics cards, appropriately titled GPUboss.com. Again, the site allows you to compare the specs between both devices, gives you a score for each, and provides comparison benchmarks.