Same here, have never owned a graphics card in my life. When I occasionally do want a modern game I don’t need it at 120FPS with max settings.
Comment on The Simple Act of Buying a Graphics Card Is the Defining Misery of PC Gaming in 2025
Elevator7009sAlt@ani.social 1 day ago
I’m having a good time on a laptop with no fancy graphics card and have no desire to buy one.
I also do not look for super high graphical fidelity, play mostly indies instead of AAA, and am like 5 years behind the industry, mostly buying old gems on sale, so my tastes probably enable this strategy as much as anything else.
icecreamtaco@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’ve been using minipcs with integrated graphics ( and one with a laptop class GPU) instead of desktops for around the house and see no reason to stop.
Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Modern high end iGPUs (e.g. AMD Strix Halo) are going to start replacing dGPUs in the entry and mid-range segments.
Elevator7009sAlt@ani.social 1 day ago
I’ll be honest, I have never paid attention to GPUs and I don’t understand what your comment is trying to say or (this feels selfish to say) how it applies to me and my comment. Is this intended to mostly be a reply to me, or something to help others reading the thread?
Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Laptops (and desktops) with no GPUs will become increasingly viable not just for older games. This was a general comment. :)
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Depending on what happens with GPUs for datacenters, external GPUs might be so rare that nobody does it anymore.
My impression right now is that for nVidia gamer cards are an afterthought now. Millions of gamers can’t compete with every company in Silicon Valley building entire datacenters stacked with as many “GPUs” as they can find.
AMD isn’t the main choice for datacenter CPUs or GPUs. Maybe for them, gamers will be a focus, and there are some real advantages with APUs. For example, you’re not stuck with one particular amount of GPU RAM and a different amount of CPU RAM. Because you’re not multitasking as much when gaming, you need less CPU RAM, so you can dedicate more RAM to games and less to other apps. So, you can have the best of both worlds: tons of system RAM when you’re browsing websites and have a thousand tabs open, then start a game and you have gobs of RAM dedicated to the game.
It’s probably also more efficient to have one enormous cooler for a combined GPU and CPU vs. a GPU with one set of heatsinks and fans and a separate CPU heatsink and fan.
External GPUs are also a pain in the ass to manage. They’re getting bigger and heavier, and they take up more and more space in your case. Not to mention the problems their power draw is causing.
If I could get equivalent system performance with an APU vs. a combined CPU and GPU, I’d probably go for it, even with the upgradeability concerns. OTOH, soldered-in RAM is not appealing because I’ve upgraded my RAM more often than other components on my PCs, and having to buy a whole new motherboard to get a RAM upgrade is not appealing.
Elevator7009sAlt@ani.social 1 day ago
Thank you for explaining!
vithigar@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Your laptop uses an iGPU. The “i” stands for integrated, as it’s built into the same package as the CPU.
The alternative, a dGPU, is a discrete part, separate from other components.
Elevator7009sAlt@ani.social 1 day ago
Thank you for explaining! I am not sure why people are reacting badly to my statement, is knowledge of GPUs something every gamer is expected to have and I am violating the social contract by being clueless?