What's the advantage of graphic card?

michaelbr · Oct 28, 2013

I'm thinking in buying a new laptop, so I'd like to know what's the advantage in having a separate video card. I'm not a game user, and the laptop will be used mainly for surfing the net, some apps such as Word, Excel, some graphics apps/editor such as Blender/Inkscape, epub editor/reader Sigil/Calibre... and watch HD vídeo (720p/1080p mainly) using Media Player Classic, so here are my questions:
- will a separate video card improve the video quality or not?
- If I use integrated video and add additional RAM, the outcome will be the same as a separate video card?

TBC1 · Oct 28, 2013

What do you mean by separate video card? as far as I'm concerned you can't get a separate gpu for a laptop.

michaelbr · Oct 28, 2013

Sorry, what I meant is video card that is not integrated with the CPU.

k1114 · Oct 29, 2013

Video quality will be the same. Adding more ram does not improve the integrated unless you needed more ram anyways. Like 2gb or less.

caj · Oct 29, 2013

If your working with cad , architecture software or even movie rendering n gaming, the gpu take d load of the processor & performs all the frames rendering. Thus smoothening your experience. If you try with a integrated gpu vs dedicated you see a big margin difference.

michaelbr · Oct 30, 2013

caj :

Sorry, I'm confused by the technical terms, when, when you said video rendering, watching a movie is considered video rendering? Or only creating video animation is considered video rendering?

michaelbr · Oct 30, 2013

Thanks all of you for your replies, now I think it's clear.

caj · Oct 30, 2013

Think of it this way. If one person was driving a car for 300 miles. He bound to reach his journey but take a longer time & offer suffer from tiredness. But if there were 2 drivers, the 2nd would basically take over, share the load & basically help the 1stbdriver rest n get baq to full strength. Think of the gpu as doing most of the work in the above mentioned fields & taking off most of the load from the processor.

michaelbr · Oct 30, 2013

caj :

Thanks so much for explaining it.

k1114 · Oct 30, 2013

Video rendering is video encoding, it's not watching a movie. His explanation is misleading. The cpu and gpu won't both be drivers, they would be like an engineer and a designer. They could work together, one can do some tasks of the other but they can't do the job of the other. Cpus and gpus work differently hence they exist as separate entities. While gpu acceleration is coming to many software, the gpu just can't do everything a cpu can and vice versa. Cad, arch soft and gaming does not take the load off the cpu to an extent. For 3d software, there is gpu rendering and cpu rendering, they are so different that they have to use different renderers. Viewports will always be gpu controlled, task handling will always be cpu controlled. Games are a similar situation; gpus render the graphics and cpus will be handling game mechanics. It actually increases cpu load with higher graphics as both the cpu and gpu have different jobs.

Now for what you do:
Video players can have post post processing which is more efficient to use a gpu. If you don't know what post is then don't worry about it. Most players are cpu based with gpu acceleration available but off by default (like mpc), not to mention most codecs don't support gpu acceleration and video playback isn't demanding. Graphics programs are the only ones which may benefit from a more powerful gpu. Inkscape has no gpu acceleration but blender, as with anything 3d, will want a bit more power. The igpu will be powerful enough for 2d and light 3d work. Internet browsers will have some gpu acceleration but as said the igpu handles 2d fine. The other software is cpu based.

michaelbr · Oct 30, 2013

k1114 :

Video rendering is video encoding, it's not watching a movie. His explanation is misleading. The cpu and gpu won't both be drivers, they would be like an engineer and a designer. They could work together, one can do some tasks of the other but they can't do the job of the other. Cpus and gpus work differently hence they exist as separate entities. While gpu acceleration is coming to many software, the gpu just can't do everything a cpu can and vice versa. Cad, arch soft and gaming does not take the load off the cpu to an extent. For 3d software, there is gpu rendering and cpu rendering, they are so different that they have to use different renderers. Viewports will always be gpu controlled, task handling will always be cpu controlled. Games are a similar situation; gpus render the graphics and cpus will be handling game mechanics. It actually increases cpu load with higher graphics as both the cpu and gpu have different jobs.

Now for what you do:
Video players can have post post processing which is more efficient to use a gpu. If you don't know what post is then don't worry about it. Most players are cpu based with gpu acceleration available but off by default (like mpc), not to mention most codecs don't support gpu acceleration and video playback isn't demanding. Graphics programs are the only ones which may benefit from a more powerful gpu. Inkscape has no gpu acceleration but blender, as with anything 3d, will want a bit more power. The igpu will be powerful enough for 2d and light 3d work. Internet browsers will have some gpu acceleration but as said the igpu handles 2d fine. The other software is cpu based.

Thanks so much for such detailed explanation, now I understand better and when I have time, I'll try to study further, but your explanation solved my question. Thanks

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What's the advantage of graphic card?

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