Do you plan 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 and we want to play? Will it be good enough for that, or is it much better to spend a little more on dedicated graphics hardware?
We have decided to answer the question from the perspective of PC games that are not casual and also from the perspective of emulators of very old systems. So we are going to focus on those who want to set up a computer to play games, since we understand that what they are looking for is to be able to enjoy the latest news.
Because you can not play well with an integrated graphics
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 is repeated several tens of times per second and, therefore, you will need to have 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 the following:It is always better to have a dedicated graphics card in your system than not using the integrated one inside the CPU. So if you are going to consider a PC to play, the first thing you have to think about is what model of graphics card you are going to use, since this will influence, among other things, the monitor of your PC. 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 for said hardware is related to games, since it is well proven and known that they are an essential piece to play. The technical reasons why iGPUs are worse? Well, they are totally physical, which are the following:
- A iGPU has to share space with the rest of the processorso it’s going to have fewer cores than a chip dedicated entirely to graphics.
- The fact of sharing memory access with the CPU and the use of types of RAM dedicated more to latency than bandwidth makes the performance of the integrated graphics much worse for games. We are only going to see the reverse model in video game consoles.
- An integrated graphics is a second class citizen in a processor, since the CPU cores will have preference when sharing the processor consumption. That is, 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 conventional one.
