When buying a laptop, in addition to the general technical characteristics and the capacity of its battery, you should pay attention to such a component as a video card. It depends on how much powerful graphics programs you can run on your new PC.
The task of any PC video card is to render the image and display it on the monitor. The quality of the image depends on how powerful the video card is in your laptop, and the very fact of whether the engine will "pull" the loaded graphics.
Laptop video cards are divided into:
-integrated, which use the computing power of the central processor and the total RAM of the device;
- discrete, which have their own processor for graphics operations and their own dedicated RAM. Such cards are installed in the slots of the motherboard.
Integrated graphics
Most modern budget notebooks are equipped with integrated video cards, which are enough for watching videos, surfing the Internet, using various office programs and running games with low system requirements. As a rule, the price for such laptops is low and affordable for almost every user. Since the graphics card is integrated into the laptop's central processing unit, the main players in this market are processor manufacturers Intel and AMD.
The most widespread is the Intel HD Graphics video controller. This solution is used in many laptops in the price range from 11 to 20 thousand rubles.
Discrete Graphics Cards
In the modern video card market, the main manufacturers are NVidia GeForce and Radeon, which produce discrete video cards. Whether you play powerful graphics games or use a laptop to create videos, use a PC with modern powerful graphics editors such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel Drow, you cannot do without a discrete graphics card. True, such a laptop will be several orders of magnitude more expensive, but you can work on it with any graphics. However, there is also a minus - discrete cards "eat up" a lot of energy, i.e. the laptop will work autonomously for a shorter amount of time than the one on which the integrated graphics card.
Discrete video cards are characterized by the following indicators:
- core clock frequency, which is measured in megahertz;
- memory bandwidth, measured in gigabits per second;
- the number of texture processors;
- the number of universal processors.
The higher these specs, the better the discrete graphics card you choose. Of the best and most modern, the following are recommended:
- Radeon R9 295X2;
- Radeon YD 7990;
- GeForce GTX Titan Black;
- GeForce GTX 780.
