“This is Intel recognizing that they’ve got to get more competitive on the GPU side of things,” says Tom Mainelli, program vice president of devices and AR/VR at the market research firm IDC. This, coupled with the company’s recent decision to integrate AMD’s GPU technology into some of its high-end mobile CPUs (like the kind found on the new Dell XPS 15 2-in-1), points to an increased emphasis on GPUs for even non-gamers. It's not necessarily hard-you basically open the case and slot in the card.Īs an indication of just how mainstream GPUs have become, Intel recently announced plans to release a graphics card of its own in 2020. With a desktop, though, you also have the option of installing a GPU on your own. The easiest way to ensure your computer has one of these graphics cards is to include it in the configuration at the time of purchase. Prices for these cards start at around $100 and go up (and up) from there-though non-gamers can still get appreciable computing benefits from a lower-end model. Two companies, Nvidia and AMD, make the most popular consumer-grade GPUs, with models available for both desktop and laptop computers. “It’s focused on graphics and video,” says Fisco.

As a general-purpose chip, it’s tasked with everything from turning mouse clicks into retweets to launching Windows Update at the scheduled time. “A CPU is like the captain of the ship,” says Richard Fisco, an electronics program manager at Consumer Reports. Modern games? They all but require a powerful graphics card just to get to the loading screen. Originally released in June 1996, “Quake” was one of the first games to take advantage of GPU technology, and though it ran well enough with only a CPU, adding a GPU to the mix transformed it into a graphical powerhouse that’s still fondly remembered to this day. Gamers know this better than anyone else. Sure, a general purpose CPU (or central processing unit) can also draw icons and animate scrollbars, but not nearly as fast as a specialized GPU. The acronym stands for graphics processing unit, a kind of processor that specializes in manipulating graphics data.

Gaming graphics card for pc