GPUs/CPUs

Howdy hey everyone. I just got my first gaming desktop through digital storm. However, I am very lost on the main importance of some of these components in a gaming desktop. In the future, which parts of a gaming desktop PC should I focus on the most? What is it that I really should be looking our for and how can I tell which GPU/CPU will provide me with the best gaming/streaming experience ever? Also, why is it that an SSD is faster than an HDD? Moreover, why is it that most GPUs are so expensive these days? I hope you all are safe during this hectic year during this pandemic and I am looking forward to somebody/anybody answering some or all of these questions. Thanks and nice to meet you all! ^^ 

Snaike summed it up pretty well.

The GPU is most important for gaming, because it's doing all of the on-screen drawing. It takes a lot of horsepower to draw a 3D animated scene at 60 frames per second. Most games that don't run fast enough are being held back by a GPU that can't handle the workload.

The CPU is important too, but not nearly as important as the GPU. The CPU handles things like game logic, controls the behavior of robotic enemies, and it also spends a lot of time feeding information to the GPU. In other words, the CPU describes what needs to be drawn, and feeds that information to the GPU. Then the GPU does the hard work of actually drawing it. Most games are not held back much by a slow CPU.

As Snaike mentioned, HDDs are spinning mechanisms. Think of them as old school record players where there is a spinning disk, and a needle that reads information off that disk. The information that you need may take a while to spin into place. Also, the needle needs to move back and forth over the disk (referred to as seek time.) All of that physical motion takes a while, and it's really slow compared to SSDs. On the other hand, SSDs have no moving parts. It's just a big electronic circuit with a ton of information stored in it. Accessing that information seems nearly instantaneous when compared to HDDs.

Oh...and watch this:

https://youtu.be/ZrJeYFxpUyQ

My friends have you covered. I'll only add that in the last couple of years, the power of the top three or four CPUs from Intel and AMD have been in direct and fierce competition with each other. The result has been that the newest versions have become so fast and advanced that they're perhaps a bit overpowered for just gaming. As this continues into the future, there should be very little worry that one of the top 3 or 4 chips of each flavor should not keep up with gaming for several years after purchase. Gone are the days of buying the most powerful CPU and overclocking it to keep ahead of the latest games IMHO.

While video in gaming has become more complex and demanding, the GPUs have taken on more of the total processing workload. They are getting very much more capable with each new generation. This is a synergy that has been a long time coming, but enables all the great advances in graphics we are seeing these days. The GPU is the heart of any gaming rig, for sure.

Programming for consoles is quite different than programming for a PC in that every console is exactly one configuration. PCs have so wide a range of parts in them it has to be a chore to bridge all those specs. Most games designed from the ground up for the PC perform very well out of the box. Built initially for consoles, "ports" to PC can be all over the place, because the designer comes in after the fact when he sees his game is a hit. A ton of new code has to be added to account for the vast variety of configs, and 2-4 year backwards compatibility as well. That's often a very tough job, and sometimes doesn't work so well on the first try (or ever).

There is not much of an issue across the board with operating systems for PC IMHO. There are fans of the various ones that work well, and so there is some "my OS is better than yours" flak that flies around, but it's opinion. That one OS or another may have a problem on a particular machine is almost always a failed part, corrupt install, or fixable problem. In 36 years operating PCs, I know of several that have been excellent, a few that have been quite weak, but always they end up better eventually. So far....