A graphics controller is a device that displays a picture on the screen. Responsible for image quality in games, watching movies and surfing. This is one of the main elements of computers and laptops. The overall performance, speed and, of course, price depend on the graphics card. We offer you to familiarize yourself with the rating of mobile video cards launched on the market since 2014.
Five leaders
The palm branch for leadership in the video chip market is shared between the two largest manufacturers. These are Nvidia and AMD. The creators of Nvidia made a technical breakthrough, switching in 2016 from the ninth generation of Maxwell to the Pascal platform. Therefore, the honorable first place belongs to the video card GeForce GTX 1080.
Model Radeon RX 580 in second place in the ranking of mobile video cards. AMD decided to keep up with the competitor: in 2016, they released the fourth-generation RX 400 line, and later showed the world the flagship on the updated Polaris architecture under the RX 580 mark.
The following boards are classed below:
- Radeon R9 M295X;
- GeForce GTX 1050;
- GeForce 840M.
How did we define it
There are two types of video cards: integrated and discrete. The former are directly integrated into the northbridge of the motherboard or processor, such as Intel’s HD Graphics. Discrete is a separate chip with its own VRAM from 2 to 8 GB. The advantages of an integrated graphics core are this price and power consumption. There can be no talk of any competition between these two types of video cards.
Integrated models use system RAM and are inferior in power to their discrete relatives. Therefore, the performance rating of mobile video cards with discrete graphics is higher. If you intend to play with high settings on a laptop, an integrated GPU is not suitable for you. They are intended only for working with office programs or surfing.
The value of brands
Quadro, GeForce, Radeon, Iris - a line of graphics adapters that inform the user about the capabilities of the board. For example, Nvidia’s Quadro belongs to the class of workstation chips, while the GeForce GTX belongs to the main line of gaming and multimedia graphics processors. The name is the determining factor in the rating of mobile video cards.
AMD GPUs traditionally have the nickname Radeon, followed by a prefix that talks about chip performance. R9 is AMD's high-performance line, and R7 is the mid-range. R5 and R3 are among the company's entry-level chips.
If the marking contains the letter “M” placed before the second batch of numbers, the board is designed for mobile devices such as laptops and tablets. However, starting from the 400th series, AMD abandoned the familiar “M” and marked each chip in the line with the “RX” index.
The number that follows means generation. The larger it is, the higher the rating of a mobile video card. The second and third figures indicate performance, the core of the video card, and speed parameters. An “X” at the end means that this version is faster than the previous one. For example, the R9 380 chip is slower than its successor labeled 380X.
GPU Features
The rating of mobile video cards for laptops is also determined by a set of characteristics: ROP, TMU, type of memory. In order not to get lost in the wilds of abbreviations, we offer a set of basic specifications:
- Bandwidth - The speed at which data can be read or written to VRAM. Measured in gigabytes per second. High-bandwidth GPUs render images quickly and efficiently.
- Clock frequency - measured in megahertz and also affects performance.
- CUDA kernels. CUDA is the Nvidia programming language that controls the GPU to perform tasks with greater speed and efficiency. A chip can contain thousands of cores. Their number affects the acceleration of graphics, the ability to perform specific mathematical and cloud computing. The leader of our top contains 2560 cores.
- Stream processors. This is AMD's answer to CUDA. The technology is responsible for performing the mathematical calculations necessary for rendering graphics. The line of fourth-generation Radeon RX has 2048 Stream-processors.
Based on the proposed characteristics, you can make your rating of mobile video cards or GPUs for PC.