question regarding graphics cards on notebook

in a lap with hdmi out, does a weak graphics cards pose any loss?

how negative is a shared graphics card.

 

Depends upon what you are doing with such a graphics card. If you're playing games, then, of course you will suffer. If you're just doing movie playback or word processing on your HDMI-capable display, then, probably not.

 

No, a weak or powerful GPU will output a movie or your desktop to an external monitor exactly the same.

 

That's not entirely true. Different cards offer different post-processing capabilities for video content. Both AMD and Nvidia have continued to introduce new features with newer generations of cards, and sometimes the weaker cards in the same generation will lack the full range of features.

Considering this, it would seem that the desktop HD 5450 lacks the power to offer the full range of post-processing, so one would assume that laptop Cedar graphics (the HD 5470 in particular) would be the same. Admittedly, many people prefer to have most kinds of post-processing off anyway, but vector-adaptive deinterlacing is definitely something you want to have any time you get interlaced content.

 

I've noticed that sometimes the high end cards don't get the same exact feature set when it comes to video playback as the mid or lower range cards, simply because they were most likely purchased for gaming or 3D intensive applications, not for video watching. The only case I can think of this however was with the desktop Geforce 8 series. Mid and low range cards in the line had more/better features for playback of video and media than the 8800s. If typical home office and internet browsing is all you're doing, then I wouldn't be too worried. Video could be an issue if it's HD, and then you have all the other video related features that may or may not concern you. Look into specific info for your laptop's GPU. If your machine is rather current, it's highly likely there will be substantial documentation on it's video and media playback features to do the high importance of media and entertainment capabilities with laptops these days.

 

Regarding post processing, users would also have to know how to use it. Not all software will output video through that pipeline.

 

I think that that's mostly because the high-end cards are always released first. For example, I believe the later 8800 GT had all of the features of the lower-end cards, even though the original GTX and GTS did not.