Graphics Card Question?

[Futhark]

The MBP 13" comes with on board graphics where as the MBP 15" comes with on board graphics and a second graphics card. Apart from gaming where are the advantages to having this second graphics card? I'd imagine video editing but can someone explain why?

Many Thanks

 

[Spink10]

http://www.computerknowledgeforyou.com/hardwaretips/buying_graphics_card.html

 

[T5BRICK]

A discrete graphics card is usually more powerful than an integrated one. Do you need one? Depends on what you use the computer for.

 

[richnyc]

If you are gamer or use Adobe Photoshop, Premiere type of software extensively, you would definitely benefit from a discrete GPU, otherwise integrated is fine...

Or, as my bud would say: "If you gotta ask, you probably don't need it"

 

[Futhark]

No I don't need one this is purely a question I didn't know the answer to

So what about video editing? Or converting video lets say using iMovie or handbrake, does the graphics card have anything to do in conversion or is this workload purely down to the, Processor, Ram & Hard Drive Speed?

 

[leman]

No I don't need one this is purely a question I didn't know the answer to

So what about video editing? Or converting video lets say using iMovie or handbrake, does the graphics card have anything to do in conversion or is this workload purely down to the, Processor, Ram & Hard Drive Speed?

Modern graphics cards are much more than graphics cards - they are programmable processing units consisting of hundreds of cores (think hundreds of small simpler CPUs) which can be used to process all kinds of data. There are applications out there which can utilise this computing capability for purposes like scientific computation, image encoding or image effect application (think Photoshop). AFAIK, neither iMovie nor Handbrake belong to this category.

On a unrelated note, the 15" will be much faster for video encoding (Handbrake) than the 13", simply because it has a quad-core CPU.