Hardware How important is a graphics card for graphics?

I keep hearing two things:

1.) Graphics cards are the most important thing in a PC for gaming and graphics.

2.) Graphics cards are not the most important thing; it's all how the developers make the game, and the graphics card is just how the graphics are processed.

Which of these statements is true?

 

It wholly depends on what you're doing. Normally, graphics cards are split into 3 categories. Economy, gaming, and professional.

Economy is the most popular. They are for those who just need to browse the net, play a few facebook games and use the computer in a normal, laid back fashion.

Gaming cards are obviously for hardcore gamers. These types of games push massive amounts of data through processing "pipes" that crunch data as fast as they can to give the end-user a great picture with a great refresh rate and little to no lag.

Professional cards are less about pushing graphics quickly, but rendering video and very high resolution graphics quickly and safely.

Are you editing 100x60 foot photos or banners? Are you generating, rendering and encoding video? Or are you just playing around in photoshop or photoPAINT or other similar programs?

For the vast majority of casual computer users, economy cards are fine, which can be had for less than $100.

 

1. No. You can have an amazing graphics card but if the rest of your PC sucks it doesn't matter.

2. What? That was going one way, then did a u-turn and went in a whole different direction. You should slap whoever you 'keep hearing' this from.

 

A good quality graphics card is mostly important for rendering 3d images, mostly in a gaming environment with a lot of movement. If you are developing graphics in something like Photoshop, then the most important factor will be memory, because the program is resource intensive. So for web development and graphic development, the graphics card is not your primary concern.