Welcome back for part three in our series on the key hardware components in a computer. If you missed Part 1 on CPUs or Part 2 on RAM, go back and check those out. This week let’s take a look at what a graphics card is.

GRAPHICS CARDS

The dedicated Graphics Card is one of most complex components that can go into a computer, because it is essentially a separate computer that gets strapped into your computer. And while a graphics card might be one of the most expensive parts in your computer, you might instead not have one at all. To understand what is so specialized about how Graphics Cards are designed, let’s first talk about what they do.

WHAT MAKES GRAPHICS HARD TO DO

To display information on your monitor, your computer is constantly making new images to put on your screen- depending on your monitor and settings, this often happens 60 times a second, but it could be as many as 240 times a second. First, your computer needs to figure out what to show on the screen. When you’re using word processor or spreadsheets this isn’t too difficult; There’s a window with your interface (all the menus and scroll bars, etc.) and the windows menu and toolbar. Then there is the workspace itself, where you input characters and it displays them. This is all relatively easy workload that is not too processor intensive.

However if you are editing high resolution photos, editing video, rendering a 3-Dimensional model, or playing a game, things get exponentially more complex. The computer has to figure out what faces of what shapes you see, what the textures projected on to those faces would look like from that angle, how the lighting would effect it, if there are things like smoke obscuring it, etc. Only then can it get to the job of assigning the right colors to the right pixels.

Your computer then needs to assign one of 16 million or so colors to all 2-8 million pixels per monitor, and then do it again between 59 and 239 more times each second. This is a staggering number of calculations each second. This means that not only does the physical distance to the RAM become an issue again, but so does the fact that getting CPU speeds above 5.0 GHz is an issue for higher resolution and higher frame-rate games. Because of all this intense math, you have two options, which vary pretty widely in cost and in the amount of graphic fidelity, especially in 3D representations, that you can get.

INTEGRATED GRAPHICS

The first route you can go with is to use integrated graphics. This is where the CPU does the graphics processing on dedicated cores, by using part of the system RAM. This works perfectly well for windows, 2D programs like word-processing, spreadsheets, and internet browsing. But it will struggle with more advanced things like 3-D rendering, and graphically demanding or high frame-rate games because each core can only do so many calculations so fast, and when that math gets more complex and a few CPU cores just cannot keep up.

DEDICATED GRAPHICS CARDS

The first thing to understand about a dedicated graphics card is that it is essentially a computer of its own, as I mentioned earlier. There is a main circuit-board that has both a processor and its own RAM attached to it, with the RAM snuggled up even closer to the processor. The RAM is also designed specifically to work with the type of parallel processing that Graphics Card processors use, where multiple cores can work on the same calculations at the same time. This allows for even faster communication between the RAM and the processor that is accessing it.

The second key is what is inside that processor. In a Graphics Card’s processor you will have a different type of core than is found in a CPU, so while it will be slower overall(0.5-1.75 GHz instead of 3-5GHz), it will be optimized so that it’s faster at the specific types of calculations a graphics card needs to do. On top of that, there will be many more cores than there are in a CPU. As of today, the consumer CPUs with the most cores would be either the AMD Threadripper 3990X for $3,600 or the  AMD EPYC 7742 for $4,560, both with 64 cores. In an entry level graphics card, like NVIDIA’s GTX 1650, you get 4 GB of specialized Video RAM, plus a full 896 cores to process your graphics, all for only about $180. And in the newly announced NVIDIA RTX 3070, for $499, you get not only 8 GB of Video RAM, but you also get a massive 5,888 cores. These cores can’t do as much of what a CPU core does, but when it comes to graphics, they blow a normal CPU core out of the water.

LAPTOPS

In general, most laptops are focused primarily on being light-weight and having a long battery life. Tied to this is also reducing the amount of heat generated by the components so it can be smaller and quieter as well. All of these things mean that many laptops use integrated graphics, sacrificing power for portability. However, as components are getting smaller and more efficient, small, low powered graphics cards are becoming more common in laptops, however all but the most expensive laptops still involve some trade-offs in this department. This is one of the reasons that if you are doing graphically intensive work, a desktop may be the direction you want to look. But, if a laptop is a must, you can find some that will have a substantially powerful graphics card, but often at the sacrifice of weight, size, battery life, and heat.

You need to really pay attention to how the graphics processing is described on some laptops to make sure you know what you are getting. As of now, Intel does not make a dedicated, consumer, graphics card, so if a laptop has Intel Graphics, you know it has integrated graphics processing. Likewise, NVIDIA currently doesn’t have CPU manufacturing (However they just bought ARM, a CPU manufacturer, so this might change in coming years), so if it says NVIDIA or GeForce graphics you know it’s a dedicated chip. But AMD powered laptops can be more difficult to parse because they make CPUs AND graphics cards. So sometimes their AMD Laptop CPUs might say that they have “Radeon” graphics, which is the name for their line of graphics cards, but that actually means they have an integrated graphics card on an AMD processor. If it is a dedicated AMD graphics card it will generally say something closer to “Radeon RX 5500M” or some other model number after the ”Radeon” name to denote it as a dedicated graphics processor.

CONCLUSION

If you work on complex photo editing with large file sizes, edit video, render 3-D models, play newer games, or dabble in any of that on a lighter level but with multiple monitors, a dedicated graphics card is probably the way you should go. However, if you tend to just do internet browsing, sort family vacation photos with some slight tweaks, and then do word processing and spreadsheets for work, an integrated graphics option may be all the power you need with a significant cost savings.

If you build your own computer, or buy a desktop that has the right parts, then it’s also possible to add a graphics card to a computer that didn’t start with one, and if you already have a graphics card and your machine is starting to drag on graphics applications, one of the easier and more effective upgrades you can do is to get a new graphics card and replace your old one.

A graphics card, if you decide you need one, should cost between 20-30% of a PC build, unless you are doing really intensive graphics work or gaming, and then it could be 40% or more of the total budget.

With the CPU, RAM and Graphics Cards taken care of, next time we will dive into the last key component- Storage.

Do you have a question about any of the information I’ve given, or about something I haven’t addressed? Let me know in the comments below or contact me on my About page! I’ll try to answer your question, and I may even turn it into more content- There are things I won’t realize I need to talk about until you tell me. Thanks!