Are Laptop Video Cards For You?
Whether or not getting laptop video cards in your laptop computers is right for you depends on how you will be using it. What shows on your screen is sent there from some sort of graphics processor. Depending on the laptop computer, you may have a choice of video cards. If you surf the internet and watch an occasional DVD you don't need one-- a video accelerator or shared memory will do. For high end gaming or streaming video you probably want a laptop video card. For something in between, your computer's performance might be improved depending on the card you get. In one way notebook video cards are a two edged sword. They can speed up how quickly images are shown on your screen, but they can slow down everything else you do with your notebook computer. The problem is shared memory. If the notebook video card "shares" memory, the RAM available to do anything else with the computer is reduced. If you have 8 gigabyte of ram this isn't a problem. If you are like most of us and don't spend the extra dollars to get the additional memory, you need another answer. The solution is what they call discrete graphics. These are video cards which include dedicated memory on the card that is only used by the graphics processor. 256 megabytes of dedicated memory is generally enough even for relatively intense gaming.
Any graphics card with on-board memory will improve the notebook computer's performance, but whether you need and will notice this improved performance depends on how you use the laptop.
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