If you’re a gamer and buying a laptop then you’re probably wondering how good your laptop video card is. Video cards or GPU’s as they are referred to in the industry are very important to playing games, watching movies, or doing any kind of 3D work. Many people often buy a laptop without looking at the specifications and end up getting a low end card. Worse many laptops are marketed for gamming and simply do not have the proper horsepower.
You can have the best processor on the market, and 8 gigabytes of ram installed on your laptop. But if you don’t have a proper graphics chip in it something that’s 4 years old can run circles around it. Currently most laptops ship with integrated chips that share system ram and have no dedicated memory of their own. Why is this a problem and how is it a hindrance?
Simple, a laptop video card that is an integrated chip performs worse than a dedicated card. It is simply a chip built into the board and while this is a space saving design it’s not very powerful. Dedicated cards like what you buy for a desktop are chips with their own boards, and installed memory. There are dedicated cards for laptops and while not upgradeable, can provide a substantial amount of power.
The main drawback with an integrated chip as mentioned above is that it shares system memory. This means that the memory bus for the card is only as fast as the ram installed on the computer. This is the same for laptops and desktops that use integrated chips. It also takes valuable system resources away from the operating system that could be used for other things.
If you have 4 gigabytes of ram then you might not have a problem, but usually a laptop video card that does this isn’t a very powerful chip. The main problems with the chips being used is they are video cards meant for simple office programs, and web browsing. It’s simply a waste to couple a dual or quad core processor with one of these low end units. Not to mention almost impossible to play games with them.
A laptop that has a dedicated GPU with its own memory installed will perform much better, and usually be much more advanced. This allows for better performance in games, rendering applications, and movie playback. The more powerful a graphics card is the faster it will render images and frames. It will also take additional load off of the CPU to help the speed of your computer.
Make no mistake a dedicated card that has a 2 year old chip on it can often outperform an integrated card with a modern chip. You also have to take into account what ram is installed on the video card and in the system when thinking about performance. Obviously a video card with DDR 1 ram will not perform well for modern games. However a video card with DDR3 ram installed on it will be a power house, and might even outperform cards that are two generations ahead of it. So remember when choosing a laptop buy one after consulting the specifications, and not the advertisements.