The $10 onboard video chip
There is no separate video chip these days except in cases
of some server boards. It's a (barely) more expensive
northbridge, or with some northbridge single-chip solutions
it could require enough die real-estate that instead of a
single chip, chipset, the board then uses both north and
southbridges as they did in older or other more featured
designs. In any case, the chip doing video on a PC has the
mainboard chipset functions too.
puts all of the graphics processing load onto
your CPU,
The CPU will process graphics to a similar extent either way
(onboard or video card), with the exception being newer 3D
games where certain (DirectX, usually) feature sets would be
done in software rather than hardware. We can usually
ignore this difference because the integrated video wouldn't
otherwise be suitable for the 3D use this occured in- in
that use, the video is still the bottleneck, it didn't
matter whether the CPU had any addt'l processing from this.
The main differences are three:
1) Integrated video has less processing silicon devoted to
it, so it still does the processing but slower. Whether it
matters in use depends on that use, normally only in
semi-modern 3D uses will it matter.
2) Integrated video uses main system memory (in all but
rare cases, in old socket 370////Intel 810 chipset for
example there was an option for addition of memory chips
onboard instead of using system memory, or on server boards
with separate video they may have a dedicated frame buffer.
When using system memory, it is slower access than a
dedicated bus and faster memory on the same video (card),
which is not a bottleneck for typical 2D uses, but is with
3D gaming where there is a lot more data being processed,
than being output to the monitor.
3) The system memory used by the integrated video, it's use
usurps a bit of the total system memory bandwidth available,
reducing what is left for other non-video-related functions.
The more modern a system is (and faster the memory
technology is), the lower the percentage of total througput
that is used for the video. If the tasks are 2D it can be a
matter of what the total system is like and whether spending
addt'l money on a video card would increase performance as
much as spending same amount of money on more memory, faster
CPU, hard drive, or other factors that contribute to
performance.
so your system will run slower than if you had a video card.
In many typical uses the difference is small enough the user
couldn't perceive it, it'd require a benchmark to
differentiate and even then there would often be other
bottlenecks more significant.
Not really, plenty of onboard audio has similar CPU demands
as a separate card does, though with 3D positional audio
effects (normally in gaming) it would take a specific
hardware based card (Creative Labs products are the most
common) to make a difference. That same Creative Labs card
will not make any difference for more routine uses like
playing an MP3 or wav file.
n '(Sat, 03 Mar 2007 12:22:06 -0800))