Selecting the perfect
graphic cards

Have you ever given a thought as to how graphic cards boost the quality and details of the images of your game ?

The bullets that you shoot and those blood drenched dead enemy bodies infact are very resource intensive in nature. They use enormous amount of memory space.

We will help you with the knowledge of memory utilization by the graphics system. That will keep you in better standing for deciding which of the graphic options to choose.

Desk top computers allow you to replace a low-end AGP card with a faster one. But the graphics sub systems in laptop computers are not usually user replaceable. Thus video graphic card upgradation is not possible in most of the laptops. So go for the best that you can afford.

Understanding laptop computer graphic types is important to making graphic cards selection.

Following are the graphics options for your laptop

• Video integrated with the graphics memory hub chip on the motherboard
• Discrete graphics chip or module on the motherboard

Integrated graphic system works in tandem with other applications that run on your system when it comes to memory usage. They share the memory with other functionalities and thus are relatively slow as compaired to the discrete graphic cards.

Slow performance because of the shared memory in case of integrated graphic solutions makes it less useful for dedicated gaming, as it is not optimized for video display. The integrated solution exhibits a slow clock speed, another set back for game lovers.

Many integrated graphic solutions also lack support for multiple displays.

So...no scope really for displaying your gaming abilities to the audience in public with the integrated graphic system.

Thus it's important that the graphics card of your gaming notebook does not share memory resources with other applications running on your system. This is where discrete graphic chip or module on the motherboard comes to the rescue.

Discrete graphics solutions for gaming notebooks have a dedicated memory. The graphics subsystem might use discrete graphics chips or it may use the memory embedded in the graphics chip itself.

Discrete graphic solutions support multiple display. They render faster DirectX support. The level of DirectX support however depends upon the graphics chip.

These graphic solutions are faster compaired to integrated solutions because the graphic chip has it's own memory or accesses a dedicated memory. Moreover they process only the graphics data.

Nvidia and ATI are the popular manufacturers of graphic cards.

Some best of the breed graphic cards are

• Nvidia Geforce Go 6800
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9800
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
• Nvidia Geforce FX Go 5700
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9600

Also check out

• ATI Mobility FireGLv3200
• Geforce FX Go 5200
• Mobility Radeon 9200

The above cards are suitable for the needs of your gaming notebooks because they have a faster access to dedicated video memory.