news hardware No need for an RTX 4090 to play video games on PC!
PC gaming can be very moody at times. Between console exclusivity, poorly optimized games, or quite simply the exorbitant cost of a gaming PC, it can put more than one off. Fortunately, there are solutions to play on a PC without a graphics card!
What is a graphics card used for?
With the possible release of the RTX 4000 in late 2022, PC gaming has piqued the interest of many gamers.
But then why is it essential to have the latest fashionable graphics card to play video games?
A graphics card or GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) is a processor dedicated to displaying 3D graphic elements on a PC screen. The quality of an image, as well as its refresh rate, largely depends on the available video memory of your GPU and its ports.
Graphics cards, which became popular in the late 90’s, have evolved to support calculations that are too heavy for your processor to handle alone. Today, the video memory in graphics cards can convert digital data into images on your screen much faster.
Your GPU then has two distinct jobs, one to receive information from software (a game, an application) and the other job is to display a corresponding image.
While video memory could still be displayed in MB (mega bytes) in the 2000s, the dedicated video memory of graphics cards has usually been between 2 GB and 24 GB for some time.
If we look at the Steam page of a game like Marvel Spider-Man, we see that the developers recommend a graphics card with at least 6GB of dedicated video memory from Nvidia or 8GB of VRAM from AMD.
Models are obviously displayed to guide the player, but it can be difficult to know concretely whether or not we can play with the equipment we have.
When it comes to graphics cards, two schools compete: Nvidia and AMD. Both have very different architectures and then offer more or less comparable performance depending on the games or software used.
Gaming on a PC without a graphics card: yes, but which games?
As I said, a graphics card is primarily there to support your computer’s processor in the calculation of 3D images.
In concrete terms, it is quite possible to play video games without a graphics card. In fact, current processors have an iGPU for Integrated Graphic Processing Unit. That means your processor is fully capable of displaying 3D images itself, but of course there are some trade-offs.
For example, on an Intel i5-10600K processor we find the following iGPU: Intel UHD Graphics 630.
Let’s take the example of an Intel i5-10600K with an iGPU UHD Graphics 630, You can play some games like Grand Theft Auto V at around 30 fps (in Full HD) or even Fortnite at 900p resolution at around 60 fps.
I’ve taken the case of games here, which aren’t necessarily very greedy or a little “old”, as of course newer 3D video games require better processing power to display the game correctly.
A graphics card is then essential if you want to play in good conditions without having to compromise on resolution or fluidity.
You may then be interested in graphics card models from AMD or Nvidia, but you should know that the two manufacturers are preparing a completely new GPU generation that should appear by the end of 2022.