re: Build the Best Gaming PC Your Money Can Buy: A Detailed Guide (Updated Sep 2014)

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++++ALERT: You are reading an out-of-date version of the guide and wasting your time. Read the PDF for the most accurate up-to-date info.It's best to download the PDF and use a proper PDF reader. Google's formatting of PDFs breaks all of the links. Link to directly download the PDF. I have stopped updating the text in the thread because the forum's limited code makes it far too time-consuming to change images and add text.++++
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The Video Card

You probably know the two big players in gaming graphics: AMD and NVIDIA. They’re constantly at war, and it’s definitely not one-sided. Both companies continue to edge each other out with each new release.

The never-ending war and the uncertainty of future game requirements make it difficult to choose a side. It also doesn’t help that video card specs are among the most confusing of all PC components, even for some enthusiasts. In addition to GPU and memory frequency, there’s texture rate, pixel rate, shaders, texture mapping, memory bus, floating point, memory bandwidth, and so on. Making a decision based on those specs is complicated and unnecessary. On top of that, there are various product lines meant for different levels and types of use, and those product lines have their own models and submodels. The goal in this section will be to simplify the decision-making process as much as possible. The only question that really needs to be answered is this: How well do these video cards perform in actual games?

And on that note, let’s talk about the settings that drive performance.

====///====In-Game Graphic Settings====\\\====
When you first launch your shiny new PC game, the next thing you’ll want to do is optimize your visual experience by changing the in-game settings. Some games will try to detect your hardware and automatically adjust the settings based on that, but those auto settings are too conservative at best, and way off base in many cases. Here are some of the common settings you’ll want to check:

====Resolution====
If you have a 1920x1080 monitor, you need to be playing at 1920x1080. Some people recommend lowering resolution so that you can turn up other settings. If you’re building a gaming PC and you aren’t able to run games at your native resolution, you should not have built a gaming PC.

====Antialiasing====
If you’ve ever looked at a curved or straight object in a game and noticed that the edges appeared to be made up of small staggered squares making the edge look jagged, you’ve witnessed what’s called “aliasing” (commonly referred to as “jaggies”). This occurs because what you are seeing on your screen is only a sample of the 3D data being processed by your GPU. The resolution of your monitor limits the number of pixels your GPU is able to show you. Pixels are square, not round, so the more pixels you have, the less aliasing you will be able to perceive. The image below shows an example of aliasing. Notice the jagged edges on every object.


Particularly, the jagged power lines are a quite noticeable side effect of aliasing. Image borrowed from tweakguides.com

This is where the antialiasing feature comes into play. This takes those jagged lines and resamples them (once, twice, as much as eight times depending on your settings) to blend them with the rest of the displayed textures.

A simple visual example of what antialiasing does to edges:



The results can be quite noticeable, as shown in the example below:


Image borrowed from tweakguides.com

The size of your monitor can affect your perception of aliasing. The pixel count on a 1080p monitor is the same at 27” as it is at 22”. The larger the monitor, the larger the pixels. Depending on viewing distance, the smaller monitor will provide a perceptively clearer, less jagged image. Antialiasing in general requires more RAM and GPU power compared to other settings. How much is a difficult question to answer because it depends on the game, your GPU, your drivers, and the type of antialiasing being used—and there are quite a few, ranging from GPU- and memory-intensive brute force multi/super sampling antialiasing (MSAA/SSAA) to software-based types such as fast approximate antialiasing (FXAA), the latter being less effective but causing little or no performance loss.

Because of the immense variables here, it’s difficult to plan a PC with the expectation that it will handle every game with maxed out antialiasing. In fact, MSAA/SSAA is the first thing you should reduce or eliminate if your in-game frame-rate is suffering.

As I said above, the size of your monitor can affect how noticeable aliasing is, which gives an added benefit to 1440p monitors. A 27” 1440p monitor will have more pixels than a 27” 1080p monitor, of course. More pixels per inch means smaller pixels, and smaller pixels means less noticeable aliasing. It makes 1440p a more viable option if you’re interested in a larger screen for more immersive gameplay—while you’ll ideally need a powerful GPU for that resolution, you can greatly reduce or disable antialiasing in modern games with no significant reduction in visual quality, and that gives you plenty of headroom to max out other settings.

The topic of antialiasing options can be a guide in itself. For an in-depth look at the types of antialiasing options and how they affect performance, read this page from tweakguides.com: LINK, as well as this comparison guide from benchmark3d.com: LINK


====Anisotropic Filtering====
While antialiasing improves edges, anisotropic filtering (AF) improves surfaces. 3D objects in a game contain 2D textures, which can vary in appearance depending on view angle and distance. In short, AF alters the filtering pattern of textures to make them less blurry at a distance or at an angle. I won’t spend much time on this because it’s generally an easy setting to keep enabled or at its max sampling rate. It usually does not cause nearly as much performance loss as hardware-based antialiasing.

====Texture Quality====
This is by far the most important setting in the game. I think this image pretty much sums it up:


Cropped screenshot from Skyrim: High and Low Texture Quality.