Playing games at max settings? Graphics card.Video encoding? Graphics card. CAD works? You need a graphics card for that too!
Call it video card, display adapter or a graphics card, but the product will be the same. Graphics card must be very important to you if you are interested in levelling up your gaming experience or are a video editor or if your desktop screen has a CAD application's icon.
Call it video card, display adapter or a graphics card, but the product will be the same. Graphics card must be very important to you if you are interested in levelling up your gaming experience or are a video editor or if your desktop screen has a CAD application's icon.
What is it?
First of all, what are graphics cards? Graphics card is an expansion card which connects in the motherboard of your PC. It helps in rendering and processing images and videos and thats why it is most of the times mentioned as a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The graphic cards come with different RAM sizes which range from a mere 256 MB to a massive 12 GB GDDR5 RAM.How it works?
A graphics card works in partnership with the CPU. What CPU does is that it seeds the information about the image to be displayed and sends it to the GPU and the GPU decides how to create the image using the pixels on the screen. It then sends the information to the monitor about the image through the cable connected to it.
You might have often heard about 2 or more graphic cards configuration. This may prove to be helpful in some cases. Such configuration are either called SLI or CrossFire enabled. These are simply the names of configuration of NVIDIA and AMD GPUs respectively. What benefit it gives is a better performance in a single output by using the processing power of the cards. Although many games support this, some games may not be happy with these.
What's good for me?
If you are just a casual gamer, then you will not want a graphics card because the CPUs nowadays have a better integrated graphics that will help you play most of the games including free ones such as Fortnite Battle Royale. If you are wanting to push the limits and go for the best gaming experience you may check NVIDIA Titan X or GTX 1080 Ti.
For the ones who need "just enough" gaming juice, then my suggestions will be to take either AMD RX 470 or NVIDIA GTX 970.
For the video editors/CAD works, take the graphics card of 8 or 11 GB VRAM according to your budget.