Graphics Card

Laptops graphics cards used to be pretty standard, as they mostly served only one purpose – showing the operating system and applications in a responsive manner. Laptop manufacturers just stuck to the basics, typically embedding the adapter to hardware right into the motherboard, with a minimal amount of power and memory.

However, more and more gamers today are turning notebooks to do their thing, which requires a lot of graphics processing power to display the rich 3d scenes that modern advanced games have. For this reason, graphic cards for laptops have become far more advanced to keep pace with the demand.

Types of the Laptops Graphics Cards

Currently there are two types of laptops graphics cards: integrated and dedicated. Integrated graphics cards are built into the motherboard; they have to share memory with the main system, and this results in slower performance. Most integrated graphics cards lack true support for actual 3d extensions. However, they are producing no heat of their own and using very little power, thus allowing for more comfortable use and longer battery life. Integrated graphics cards are quite affordable in price.

On your integrated graphics card you'll be able to run such games as Quake 4, Doom 3, Prey, Neverwinter Nights 2, etc.

Dedicated graphics cards are completely separate from the motherboard and for the most part have their own memory. Actually, these cards are smaller versions of the graphics cards that can be installed in a desktop computers. These cards have more hardware support for advanced games, and use completely dedicated Video Ram, enabling smooth and snappy performance.

The problem is that dedicated cards use much more power than integrated ones, resulting in more heat and shorter battery life. Thus, dedicated graphics cards are not a good choice for users who are doing a lot of mobile computing.

There are currently only two manufacturers of dedicated graphics cards: ATI and NVIDIA.

So, if you are looking for a laptop for gaming purposes, make sure to find out if it has a dedicated graphics card, otherwise it will be considerably lacking in the graphics department. Also, if you will be spending much time on the road, an integrated graphics card will be the best choice, to prolong your battery life.

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