Tech Folk. This may sound the most noob question ever asked maybe in quite a good time. What does a graphic card do in your computer and what influence does it have on the graphics of game? Take it easy do not swear =P just wanted to take this doubt of my mind from a long time. PS: Why are some way expensive than others?
Graphics cards are the most important thing when playing games, arguably. Someone are better because they support higher quality graphics settings, and allow it to be smoother... You can't even play Diablo 3 or some other new games without a semi-new graphics card.
the computer is perfectly capable of running without a video card, especially if it uses one of the newer processors which feature on-board integrated graphics. These aren't necessarily great for playing games, but they're capable of giving a fluid windows experience, and allowing you to do minimalistic things at decent resolutions. Dedicated graphics cards, on the other hand, take this to a further level. These have their own processing cores, their own memory, and their own features that can be utilized for many different things. A lot of what affects their price boils down to their specifications: How much memory it has What type of memory(GDDR3, GDDR5, etc.) the memory bandwidth(128 bit, 256 bit, etc.) The memory's clock speed The core it utilizes & it's core speed Shaders & shader speeds, Shader versions supported # of CUDA cores in NVIDIA cards which PCI-E interface it utilizes Direct-X 9,10,11 capabilities it goes on and on...there's a laundry list of things that make a videocard what it is, and generally speaking the more you pay, the better it plays. While not always the case, you can easily generalize it as such.
