Compare discrete and integrated video card — what is the difference and what is better

Every com­put­er needs a video card. With­out it, he sim­ply will not be able to con­vert a dig­i­tal sig­nal to ana­log or cal­cu­late graph­ics. And its main task is sim­ply to ensure the oper­a­tion of the con­nect­ed mon­i­tor.

The video card itself can be dis­crete or inte­grat­ed. And these are two fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent design options. Let’s fig­ure out how they dif­fer and which is bet­ter — a dis­crete or inte­grat­ed video card.

Key features of video cards in general

The prin­ci­ple of oper­a­tion of video cards (they can also be called graph­ics accel­er­a­tors, GPUs or graph­ics cards) is quite sim­ple:

1. First, a com­mand is sent from the com­put­er’s cen­tral proces­sor to dis­play the image on the screen;

2. Infor­ma­tion about what to dis­play is sent to the video mem­o­ry. For exam­ple, in games, 3D mod­els are stored there;

3. The video proces­sor (GPU), select­ing data from the video mem­o­ry, cal­cu­lates the loca­tion of each pix­el on the screen;

4. The sig­nal is sent through the cable to the screen.

It is clear that the key com­po­nents of a graph­ics accel­er­a­tor are the video proces­sor and video mem­o­ry. The first cal­cu­lates the loca­tion of pix­els, the sec­ond stores data about objects. And, in fact, the GPU is a minia­ture com­put­er, with its own proces­sor and mem­o­ry.

How­ev­er, all this is arranged a lit­tle non-stan­dard. A video proces­sor, for exam­ple, can have sev­er­al thou­sand weak cores, and video mem­o­ry can be polled ten times faster than oper­a­tional mem­o­ry.

Why arrange it like that? Yes, to pro­vide real­is­tic graph­ics in games! To cal­cu­late the loca­tion of every object on the screen, every ray of light, every glare, every leaf and every pass­ing bul­let, the GPU has to work very fast. And resource-inten­sive cal­cu­la­tions are eas­i­er to give 40$ small cores than one large one.

What is an integrated graphics card?

As men­tioned ear­li­er, there are two types of GPUs — inte­grat­ed and dis­crete. And we will deal with the first one now.

The inte­grat­ed (embed­ded) “vidyush­ka” is built direct­ly into the proces­sor. It does not have any sep­a­rate chip on the moth­er­board, it does not have its own mem­o­ry, and the com­put­ing unit is rep­re­sent­ed by a small, low-per­for­mance coproces­sor. But it con­sumes a min­i­mum of ener­gy and is inex­pen­sive.

Since the built-in video mem­o­ry does not have video mem­o­ry, it stores all the data nec­es­sary for cal­cu­la­tions in the oper­a­tional one. That is why it is not suit­able for games. The amount of allo­cat­ed RAM is clear­ly not enough to record the entire scene, only a few objects from it.

The com­put­ing unit of the built-in graph­ics accel­er­a­tor is also very weak. There­fore scenes can­not be ren­dered quick­ly. At best, there is a “slide show”, at worst — one pic­ture freezes for sev­er­al min­utes.

If the built-in “video” is so weak, why is it need­ed at all? Well, she has a few virtues.:

1. Not all peo­ple buy a com­put­er for games. And it makes no sense to over­pay for a “dis­crete” if you do not plan to use it;

2. It heats up min­i­mal­ly dur­ing oper­a­tion. Enough of the cool­ing that is con­nect­ed to the proces­sor;

3. It con­sumes a min­i­mum of ener­gy. In gen­er­al, lap­tops with a built-in video cam­era can work on bat­tery pow­er for 6–10 hours, and with a dis­crete one — 3–4 hours.

In addi­tion, mod­ern inte­grat­ed video cam­eras are quite pro­duc­tive. Take, for exam­ple, Intel UHD Graph­ics 640. It is com­pa­ra­ble in speed to NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030! That is, even games will pull — not all, but some of the not very old ones.

What is a discrete graphics card?

If the inte­grat­ed GPU is installed direct­ly into the proces­sor, then the dis­crete one is pur­chased and installed sep­a­rate­ly on the moth­er­board. It has its own video mem­o­ry, its own com­put­ing unit, and all this can be very pow­er­ful. All so-called gam­ing graph­ics cards are dis­crete.

A large amount of high-speed video mem­o­ry is nec­es­sary for the “vidyush­ka” to store a lot of data. Top mod­els can have up to 12–16 GB of video mem­o­ry oper­at­ing at up to 16 GHz — which is 3–4 times faster than DDR4 for “RAM”.

A pow­er­ful com­put­ing unit, which in some mod­els can have 4–60$ cores, allows you to process mul­ti­ple threads simul­ta­ne­ous­ly and ren­der the most dynam­ic scenes.

Nev­er­the­less, dis­crete GPUs are spared not only from the short­com­ings of inte­grat­ed ones, but also from the advan­tages. The “dis­crete” has the fol­low­ing dis­ad­van­tages:

1. Price. Just put up with the fact that you won’t find a gam­ing video cam­era cheap­er than $500, and you will have to pay about 2,500 units of US cur­ren­cy for the top mod­el;

2. Ener­gy con­sump­tion. A high-per­for­mance video cam­era will need a pow­er­ful pow­er sup­ply. And if it is installed in a lap­top, it will be dis­charged faster than we would like;

3. Heat. For top-end graph­ics accel­er­a­tors, they often even install an addi­tion­al cool­ing sys­tem — they get so hot.

How­ev­er, if you plan to play on a com­put­er or lap­top, you can­not do with­out a dis­crete video card. Sim­i­lar­ly, you will need it to con­nect mul­ti­ple mon­i­tors or an FHD or UHD mon­i­tor.

Which is better — an integrated video card or a discrete one?

It would seem that dis­crete is bet­ter in every­thing. But let’s define the areas of use.

1. 
   If you do not plan to play on a com­put­er, if you have a lim­it­ed bud­get, if you choose a lap­top with max­i­mum bat­tery life, you do not need a dis­crete video card.

2. In all oth­er cas­es, it is nec­es­sary. Games, Auto­CAD, Blender, Maya, and oth­er 3D-ori­ent­ed soft­ware all require a pow­er­ful graph­ics accel­er­a­tor.