Someone explain graphics cards to me

I'm a dummy, explain it to me as if you were talking to a 4 year old.



Which is the best on the market?

Does the higher number mean it's better?

Why do some overheat and some don't?

Why do some laptops/computers have 2? (An SLI or something?)

In my new laptop, what one would I want? Want really good graphic/performance for all the new games like Assassin's Creed Unity/Far Cry 4 etc...




I don't get it, tried reading up but don't really understand much of it as I though an 870 would be really good, and then someone said a 765 SLI was better, and then someone else said the 670-680 (all GeForce) was better, so I'm insanely confused!

Many thanks in advance

 

It depends on your budget and needs as well as your monitor resolution, read this article http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-find-the-right-video-card-for-your-computer.html that explains well . Take a look at this post http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2422133,00.asp and this may help you find some of the best graphics cards out there along with its reviews and I think AMD and GeForce series are the best graphics cards, high-end version can be expensive though

 

Basically a graphics card is a piece of hardware which is designed to process graphics and other rendering tasks. You probably know that.

There are two major graphic card manufacturers, these are AMD and Nvidia, they both produce excellent cards, AMD has the slightly better cost-performance ratio. Having multiple graphics cards is possible with SLI or Crossfire (basically both are the same thing), this can boost your performance quite a bit but not all games have good support for it, therefore you might not see that much of a gain compared to just buying one extremely powerful graphics card.

If you are getting a laptop, then SLI/crossfire might not be a good option, especially if you are going to be gaming for long periods since it is easy for the laptop to overheat. Laptop graphics cards are generally no where near their desktop counterparts, a high end laptop graphics card will probably perform worse than a low-mid range desktop graphics card. If you really want to play video games on PC, just get a desktop PC instead.

I believe that for laptop graphics, Nvidia has now released the GTX 800m series and AMD has released their new series as well.

For Nvidia cards, the first number e.g. the 8 in the 870 or the 7 in the 770 denotes the series of cards, the bigger the number, the newer the card. The second and third numbers represent how powerful the card is, an 880 is the most powerful in the range, while 860 is mid end and 840 is low end. Also watch out for the letters in front of the numbering such as GTX or GT, if you are gaming you want the GTX cards because the GT cards are designed more towards media center use.

For AMD cards, the range is R5, R7 and R9, with R9 cards being the most powerful and R7 cards being mid range. The cards are also numbered in terms of performance, with numbering such as R9 270 and R9 275. You can also get R7 265 and R9 265, in which case the R9 265 is more powerful due to the R9 naming.

 

Here's some benchmarks: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

 

As stated above; pretty standard stuff.

You have AMD, you have Nvidia. Buying a graphics card is like buying an Apple product over a Android product. Both preform the same thing, 2 completely different architectures. AMD creates great cards at low prices, whilst Nvidia creates (95% of the time) amazing cards, at mid-to high pricing.

Now, you have different brands creating THEIR GPU's.

For example; Nvidia creating the 700 series boards, but you have EVGA (a PC brand) creating their reference card. Resulting in the card being a "EVGA GTX 7xx" (xx stands for any card).

I myself run 2 EVGA GTX 780ti's in SLI. Very powerful cards.

Now, cards overheat if they get too hot, obviously. Majority of the times the time your card will overheat is if it's overclocked wrong, faulty hardware, or using a less powerful card. Pretty much like playing Crysis 3 on a GTX 560. Don't take my word for that, I wouldn't know how it would preform.

You have reference cards which with a stock cooler on the card, then you have aftermarket coolers, or later designed cards in that particular series like the ACX cooler cards in EVGA's line of cards.

Watercooling is the next thing, pretty much it's adding a waterblock to the GPU board and running it in a loop. It's better than a reference card and aftermarket cooler. But costs a lot and requires a lot of work.

I'd honestly do some research on graphics cards, overclocking, and watercooling.
Seems difficult at first but some knowledge in this area becomes a piece of cake.

 

Wrong. Using a weaker card to play/do the same exact thing is not going to be a cause for added heat. It all has to do with the chipset, the cooling solution, and what you're doing with the card. We all remember the GF110 Fermi's, don't we? The 580 had a hell of a reputation for running uncomfortably hot, that thing not only was insanely inefficient but it also generated IMMENSE heat. The GF114-based GTX560 on the other hand ran MUCH MUCH cooler. on ANY card, if you don't keep it within its designed thermal limits, it will overheat. You can usually help augment this by using a case with good thermal flow properties(especially across the PCI area), and by manually setting a more aggressive fan profile for the GPU


A GPU can have a HUGE number of different uses for a system.

First, let's break it down. There's NVidia and AMD. Both make top notch products, with NVidia usually leading the pack in their driver support.

Both will have marginal differences in their gaming performance, currently it seems that NVidia is producing the top-performing cards as far as games are concerned. Both companies provide cards from the low-cost/low-end all the way up to the highest-end dual-card/single-slot solutions.

That being said, perhaps you're not a gamer? Perhaps you do a lot of graphical processing, or subject your card to heavy compute loads? This is where AMD excels, and is TREMENDOUSLY more powerful than NVidia cards for single and double precision compute loads, especially when coded under OpenCL. If you want an NVidia that will compete here, you generally have to look at the Quadros and the Teslas ($$) A perfect example here was when the R9-series came out and the bitcoin boomed. Nobody was hardly buying NVidias because they simply couldn't even hold a candle to the AMD's for bitcoin mining(very intensive), especially in terms of cost to build a profitable mining rig. This drove the cost of those AMD cards WAY up, and sold them out nationwide.

Your GPU can be utilized to accelerate processing in things like photoshop, which is optimized for CUDA(NVidia) and OpenCL(open platform, which AMD dominates) as well as video encoding and so forth. Since a GPU can (believe it or not) process drastically larger amounts of information and can tremendously speed things up when processing intensive things, you'll find a lot of programs are utilizing your Graphics hardware in order to provide you with a better experience.

back to gaming, though, generally your GPU is going to be used for this. Here, it is simply a matter of preference. You'll probably have a better experience with NVidia due to their drivers, but you'll likely get better performance for the same cost by going with AMD.
In some gaming rigs, people go with multiple cards in an SLI/CrossFire configuration. Now, you wanna think "two cards=double performance" right? In theory, this is how it ought to be, but in reality.....this isn't the case. Adding a second card will increase performance but not in a linear fashion. for example, a single card is 100% performance...a second MIGHT put us at 170(often times more)%...a third MIGHT put us at 190-200%, and a fourth MIGHT put us at 210%. You just never know. 660's and 670's scaled GREAT, for example.
In particular cases, some games are poorly coded for SLI/XF or don't support it at all. In the cases of laptops, an 860M sli configuration (which should run about like a single 880M or better) will only perform like a single 860M. Same applies to desktops. You can have four 780Ti's, but if the game doesn't do well with SLI...then you're looking at a TON of wasted power, and a huge waste of potential.

 

would recommend just buying one

 

Tyvm m8. Very helpful post, well worded.

No ty m8. Very useless post, poorly worded.