Why a better Graphics Card?

My newest notebook is aspire 5102 which has a ATI radeon xpress 1100 card.

It plays games like, Americans Army, San Andreas, Halo, etc: and even plays PS2 emulation well. No lag at all and I always put graphics on high settings.

There is so much talk about people upgrading their card. Even people who have the same card as me.


My question is what is the major difference? What games are being played? Doesn't RAM and Processor matter?

I also have a two year old Dell lat, just sold my aspire 1804 and have a 2001 Dell XPS desktop. Only the Graphics in my OLD Dell desktop CAN'T keep up.

I'm asking this cause, I can understand if your upgrading from a old pc. But why are so many upgrading cards from brand new notebooks?

 

Take a look at this link provided by Dreamer and maybe it will answer some of your questions. http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html I'm not a big gamer but Oblivion seems to be very popular.And it depends on what your doing for RAM and Processor speed to matter.

 

Thanks alot for that link, I'm goning to try to make sense of it.

It just came to me that, memory that comes with the card might be a big issue. Instead of using shared ram, gamers probally prefer a high dedicated ram for graphics. maybe 512mb or is that to advance?


Thats the only thing I can think of so far.



Maybe it's like HDTV, you gotta see it to understand.

 

More powerful GPUs essentially enable the player to experience games at higher resolutions with more "eye-candy" (like shaders, textures, shadows, other effects, etc.) enabled, and also at higher frames-per-second.

Some people really like to crank up the settings when they play games (particularly 3D games), which require more powerful GPUs.

 

Yea, thats one thing I always left alone. The fps. I tried to mess with it once and it screwed up, I just went back to default and set the graphics on high.

Just wondering what the highest resolution should be for a 15" screen. Mines olny goes up to 1280 by 800 32bit. I got a feeling thats pretty low, but I don't have a problem playing games or watching HD videos.

 

It depends on the resolution of the LCD on your system. Your system has a WXGA resolution (1280x800).

The highest resolution available in a 15.4" screen is WUXGA (1920x1200).