Are you planning to build a PC, but for now you prefer to do without the graphics card? What happens if we choose a processor with a good integrated graphics card and we want to play? Will it be good enough for that, or is it better to spend a bit more on dedicated graphics hardware?
We decided to answer the question from the point of view of PC games that are not casual and also from the point of view of emulators of very old systems. We will therefore focus on those who want to configure a computer to play games, because we understand that what they are looking for is to be able to take advantage of the latest news.
Because you can’t play well with an integrated graphics card
It is not possible to play with a graphics card for a very simple fact, it is not the system processor that generates the image on the monitor, but what it does is generate a list of instructions that said card will later interpret to show you the image on the screen. A process that repeats several dozen times per second and therefore you will need graphics hardware. This is integrated into the processor or in the form of a dedicated graphics card.
Regarding the question that titles this article, the clear and objective answer is as follows:It is always better to have a dedicated graphics card in your system than not using the one integrated inside the CPU. So, if you are planning to use a PC for gaming, the first thing you need to think about is the model of graphics card you are going to use, as this will influence, among other things, your PC monitor. Since graphics cards are sold in different ranges within the same family and usually related to screen resolution.
Can an integrated GPU be more powerful than a dedicated one?
Now, if integrated graphics were good enough, then there would be no graphics cards, because they wouldn’t be needed. Moreover, the entire market of the said hardware is related to games as it is well proven and known that they are an essential piece for gaming. The technical reasons why iGPUs are worse? Well, they are totally physical, which are the following:
- Nail iGPU must share space with the rest of the processorit will therefore have fewer cores than a chip entirely dedicated to graphics.
- Sharing memory access with the CPU and using types of RAM that are more dedicated to latency than bandwidth makes the performance of the integrated graphics card much worse for gaming. We will only see the reverse model in video game consoles.
- An integrated graphics card is a second-class citizen in a processor, since CPU cores will have preference when sharing CPU consumption. In other words, the iGPU will always have a lower clock speed than its architecture allows compared to its graphics card version.
So when playing an integrated graphics card, it will always be worse than a regular card.
