News hardware No need for an RTX 4090 to play video games on PC!
Published on 04/09/2022 at 17:25
PC gaming can sometimes be very capricious. Between console exclusivity, poorly optimized games or quite simply, the exorbitant cost of a gaming PC, it can put off more than one. Fortunately, there are solutions to play on a PC without a graphics card!
What is a graphics card used for?
With the potential release of the RTX 4000s at the end of 2022, PC gaming has attracted the interest of many gamers.
But then, why absolutely have the latest fashionable graphics card to play video games?
A graphics card, or GPU (Graphical Processing Unit), is a processor entirely dedicated to displaying 3D graphic elements on a PC screen. The quality of an image as well as its refresh rate largely depend on the video memory available on your GPU as well as its connectors.
Popularized in the late 90s, graphics cards have evolved and support calculations too heavy to be handled by your processor alone. Today, video memory on graphics cards can convert digital data to images on your screen much faster.
Nvidia RTX 3090 graphics card
Your GPU will then have two distinct tasks, one to receive information from software (a game, an application), and the other task will be to display an image accordingly.
If the video memory could be displayed in MB (Mega Bytes) during the 2000s, for some time now, the dedicated video memory of graphics cards is generally between 2 GB and 24 GB.
When we look at the Steam page of a game like Marvel Spider-Man, we can see that the developers recommend a graphics card with at least 6 GB of dedicated video memory from Nvidia, or 8 GB of VRAM from AMD .
Page Steam de Marvel Spider-Man
Models are obviously displayed to guide the player, but it can be difficult to know concretely whether or not we can play with the equipment we have.
For graphics cards, two schools compete: Nvidia and AMD. Both have very different architectures and then offer more or less comparable performance depending on the games or software used.
Play on a PC without a graphics card: yes, but what games?
As said before, a graphics card is there above all to support your computer’s processor in calculating 3D images.
In concrete terms, it is totally possible to play video games without having a graphics card per se. Indeed, current processors have an iGPU for Integrated Graphic Processing Unit. This means that your processor is fully capable of displaying 3D images on its own, but of course there will be some trade-offs.
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor
For example, on an Intel i5-10600K processor, we find the following iGPU: Intel UHD Graphics 630. To find out your processor, simply go to your PC’s settings window and access the system tab, then “about”. On this page, you will be able to find information on your PC, and therefore on your processor. You will finally be able to see if your processor has a good iGPU.
If we take the example of an Intel i5-10600K which has an iGPU UHD Graphics 630, you can play some games like Grand Theft Auto V at around 30 fps (in Full HD), or even Fortnite in 900p resolution at around 60 fps.
I took here the case of games that are not necessarily very greedy, or a little “old”, because of course, recent 3D video games require better computing power to display the game correctly.
A graphics card then becomes essential if you want to play in good conditions, without having to compromise on resolution or fluidity.
You can then be interested in graphics card models from AMD or Nvidia, but you should know thata whole new generation of GPUs is preparing on the side of the two manufacturers, and which should show up by the end of 2022.