Other graphic crd uses

Hi, im wondering wat other applications aside from gaming needs decent graphic card to run smoothly.

My fren told me tat applications like photoshop or playing video needs graphic card. However, i read somewhere that ONLY games utilize the cards whereas other applications only rely on processor and ram.

So...which is which??

 

Your graphics card can be used for movies, if you have the media player set to use hardware acceleration - but in any case, your display is using the graphics card to render the images, so even if you are not playing games, a good graphics card is going to improve the overall look of the things your view.

All programs use a combo of CPU, RAM and GPU, but most use the GPU to a much lesser extent.

 

Well all computers need a graphics solution wether that be a dedicated card or integrated. Without it there will be nothing on your screen. The graphics processor takes all that data and turns it into something that you can see. Now yes games need a good card becuase they are demanding. But a dedicated graphics card will also improve overall system performance. Now yes things like photoshop and video editing need a good cpu and lots of ram, but a good video card couldnt hurt. But another application that needs good graphics id CADD and related programs.

 

Photoshop doesn't care about the GPU. True, it "can't hurt", like said above, but that doesn't really answer the question.

Playing/encoding movies, 3d modelling, CAD, as well as obviously games, rely on the graphics card.

Photoshop doesn't.

(Other than in the technical sense that it does require *a* graphics card to be present, just like Windows itself does)

 

If you aren't playing games, then any low-end card will do fine. Integrated will work as well, but they take up system memory because they don't have any dedicated memory.

 

Encoding movies only does if the app is programmed to take advantage of GPU processing power. Otherwise it's a CPU-only application. Same with a number of 3D renderers. Actually, there have been some people playing around with using OpenGL calls to do scientific matrix processing as well Very funky stuff, using the graphics card as essentially an offboard secondary processor. PCIe should help a lot with that too, because you can read back the data almost as fast as you write it, versus AGP which pushes data to the card very fast, but reads it back very slow.

(Why hello Mr. Tangent... how are you today? Didn't mean to go off on you...)

 

I don't think its been mentioned yet but modern OS interfaces use it as well. OS X's Aqua has been introducing fancy and helpful effects to a Mac's desktop for several years now and Vista is set to follow suit. XGL is the Linux equivalent and is already fully functional but none of these will work well without a suitable graphics card.

 

Vista is the primary OS craving a good GPU, though all the modern integrated solutions support Vista's Aero, but not neccessarily as well as a good dedicated GPU. Mac OS X does look nice, yes, but it's been running on integrated chipsets for years. Mac's aren't really known for their outstanding GPUs. The new Mac Pro only has an nVidia 7300 after all...