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decdonald

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 15, 2009
19
0
Does Graphic Card really make a different? Can we upgrade Graphic Card?
 

jtibbitt

macrumors regular
Jan 3, 2009
103
0
Does Graphic Card really make a different? Can we upgrade Graphic Card?


In any graphics type environment (e.g. gaming, visual simulation ..... etc) it is very important. I'm not an expert, but from what I understand, in a modern computer, the GPU is usually much faster than the CPU. To digress, lots of software developers out there take advantage of this and harness the power of the GPU as well as the CPU. Modern GPUs have a type of parallel architecture known as CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). So GPUs are like little multicore chips that are not only designed to deliver lightning fast graphics to the screen, but (depending on the software and if harnessed correctly) also greatly speed up the computer in general. As one molecular modeling software team puts it (http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/gpu/):

"the fastest GPU algorithm achieves up to a 125-fold speedup over an optimized CPU implementation running on one CPU core"
 

youssefm

macrumors 6502
Oct 7, 2008
386
0
Every computer comes with a graphics card, the better the card, the better 3d applications run.. also, on notebooks, no you cannot upgrade the card
 
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