What exactly does a graphics card do?

David Banks
Authored by David Banks
Posted Monday, January 25, 2021 - 2:15am

A Graphics card is computer hardware used to display images and render images to show them as an output on the display system. This piece of hardware is very popular among the PC gaming community. Whenever you will take about games and their graphics, you will surely see different graphics cards like the RTX 3080 Graphics card and the RTX 2060 graphics card, used to maximize the performance of the game.  But have you ever wondered that graphics cards are not only built for gaming? Besides that, the graphics card are used in almost every professional work.

Types of Graphics Card

Graphics cards are the main component of display on your PC, without a graphical unit you would not be able to see anything.  You can also say that the Job of the graphics card is to manage all the graphical related work, whether it is gaming, rendering editing, or anything related to the graphical term. The Graphics cards are of two types: Integrated and Discrete graphics cards.

Integrated graphics

 The integrated graphics are available on every motherboard; their sole purpose is to only provide a basic display at a limited resolution. You cannot expect much from an onboard graphical unit’s performance because they are not designed for this. The cores do not have much power, there are fewer shading units. Integrated GPUs are most updated and used on laptops as a primary display adapter because they consume less battery and are power saving, but in terms of performance, they are not a match for the dedicated GPU. A prime example of integrated graphics would be the Intel HD series. You can find these graphics on almost every laptop which has an Intel processor on it.

Dedicated Graphics

Unlike the Integrated graphical units, Dedicated GPUs are the opposite of them; they are designed in a way to deliver performance at a very high level. These cards are used for all the known stuff like gaming and editing purposes. The power of these cards is measured by their VRAM or most commonly known as memory, and cores. The specifications differ as per models and their prices, like an RTX 2060 graphics card is available in 6GB and 8GB dedicated memory, while on the other hand, we have the GT 1030 which has only 2GB of dedicated memory.

Yes, you heard it right, the GPUs are not only meant for gaming. After gaming, there are many fields where the graphics cards are used as the main accessories and in this post, we will let you know about this.

3D models Rendering

After the gaming industry, the graphics card rules in the 3D models editing and rendering community. All the high-quality graphical objects you see in a game are created with help of a GPU. They are used to render the 3D models and create them in a way that attracts and pleases the users.  The graphics cards have a large number of cores which makes the rendering process too easy. You cannot render any 3d models on any processor, whether it could be the latest Intel I9 10th generation processor.

Video/Picture Editing

The work of the GPUs is the same as we mentioned above in video and picture editing. Especially when you edit a professional video there are many frames created in a second that is impossible to be handled by a processor only, because they are not made to solely handle this. Video editing requires big software like Adobe Illustrator, Sony Vegas to be operated. If you read the system requirements of this software you will find that these require a dedicated GPU to be installed like the RTX 2070 super and Ryzen 5700 provide video editing to up to 4k resolution which is the maximum resolution used nowadays.

Mining

Mining is based on the work of the Graphics card. Mining is the process of generating cryptocurrency by using the power of the GPUs. So basically several graphics cards are attached and their power is used at the maximum level to generate cryptocurrency. The most popular type of cryptocurrency is bitcoin. A single bitcoin is equivalent to almost $11000. That's why the graphics cards are mostly used in this work to generate bitcoins. Mining is not possible on the integrated graphical unit and for this purpose, people buy a bunch of GPUs and combine their power to create enormous power that would generate the bitcoins.

Animation

The GPU is among the most important parts used to create animations. You see 3D animated movies like Frozen, Cars, and others. These would have not been possible without the use of the graphics cards. Like above the graphics cards are used for rendering high-quality graphical frames which the CPU lacks to do due to less core clock speed. Further, we can also say that without the Graphics card the gaming and animation would not run, because they are dependent on the graphical chip, either to be created or to be watched or played.

Do we use gaming cards for rendering and animation purposes?

You can use the graphics card which is used for gaming like the RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 but we need to tell you that NVIDIA and AMD have separate series for these types of works. NVIDIA has its Quadro series which is designed to effectively work at high performance on rendering and animation purposes, while on the other hand, AMD has its FirePro series to get the same work done. Although the Firepro series has not managed to deliver the performance expected by the users, it is still used by many people because everyone has their preferences.

Are the Quadro and Firepro cards suitable for gaming?

You can do gaming on these graphics cards and they will surely deliver good performance, but if you try to compare them with a GPU that is created for gaming, then they would not be able to compete with them. Although we would not suggest anyone to buy either a quarto or FirePro graphics card for gaming.

Can I run my PC without a graphics card?

Yes, you can run your pc without a dedicated graphics card. Like we told before the integrated graphics are already present on the motherboard. The dedicated graphics card is an extension to get more performance in different categories.

That's it for today, We hope that this post would have cleared all the thoughts about graphics cards in your mind, If you still have any questions left, then you can reach out to us by commenting below.

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