Why does a computer need a dedicated graphics card for high-graphics video games, but can play 4K quality video without one?
In: Technology
Imagine the images you’re watching as a sequence of meals that the computer is serving you.
With prerecorded video, you get no menu and the computer gets a series of pre-prepared meals that it only needs to heat and serve to you. The person at the computer has no say in what happens next, and the processing steps that the computer has to do are quite simple (decompression). Typically it has a dedicated hardware circuit to do them, even.
With an interactive video game, the person at the computer gets a new menu and chooses, and the computer has to cook that recipe from scratch – and that happens typically 60 times a second or more. Since the future content isn’t known in advance it all has to be made locally which demands a stronger computer.
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