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’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?

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  • 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. :)

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    • 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.

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    • Elevator7009sAlt@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Thank you for explaining!

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  • 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.

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    • 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?

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      • Khanzarate@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Well at one point to be a computer gamer you basically needed to put together your own desktop PC.

        Integrated GPUs basically were only capable of displaying a desktop, not doing anything a game would need, and desktop CPUs didn’t integrate graphics at all, generally.

        So computer-building knowledge was a given. If you were a PC gamer, you had a custom computer for the purpose.

        As a result, even as integrated GPUs became better and more capable, the general crowd of gamers didn’t trust them, because it was common knowledge they sucked.

        It’s a lot like how older people go “They didn’t teach you CURSIVE?” in schools nowadays. Being a gamer and being a PC builder are fully seperatable, now, but they learned PC building when they weren’t and therefore think you should have that, too.

        It’s fine, don’t sweat it. You’re not missing out on anything, really, anyway. Especially given the current GPU situation, it’s never been a worse time to be a PC builder or enthusiast.

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