Why does a computer need a dedicated graphics card for high-graphics video games, but can play 4K quality video without one?
In: Technology
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A video is like a roller coaster track. It’s already built (rendered) so all that is needed is some minimal power to power the cart through it.
A game is a roller coaster on an empty lot. When you sit in the cart, the track is being built in front of you as the you move along! The track also responds to wherever you want to go. To do this requires a lot more graphical power than just playing a video.
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.
There’s more math involved with games than videos. Many games have their own physics. So if you’re playing a game and your character fails off a cliff while shooting rockets, the game has to calculate rate of fall, graphics for the scenery and how they’d change, and ditto for the rockets. All of that takes processing power, which is part of why some games heat up your unit more than others.
A video is just playing a series of pixels/ colors/ images in time with an audio file. The system doesn’t have to process/ think as much.
Video is just displaying images quickly from data.
Gaming is creating those images from scratch. Its a lot harder to make images than to just flip up the next file
It is the difference between playing a song on a CD vs playing the song live. 4K video is simply a recording, the graphics card is actually creating the video on the fly,
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