Guide Of Video Cards For Notebooks

ATI, Nvidia or Intel? Explanations and tests for orientation in the choice of graphics card for notebooks that best suits your needs.

Video cards are one of the parameters that affect more the performance of a notebook, in some cases reserving unwelcome surprises: this is due to the fact that the performance difference between video cards less powerful and the most high can be as high as 10 times as much.

This does not mean that you should always choose the best performance: the best choice for a graphics card in a notebook is the one that best adapts to the needs of end-use.

The video cards in notebooks dedicated to the consumer world (thus excluding professional video cards) are divided into 2 categories:

1. Integrated (Intel GMA)
2. Dedicated (NVIDIA GeForce - ATI Mobility Radeon)

The integrated video cards (otherwise known as IGP - Integrated Graphics Processor) are less powerful chips that process video streams using the system memory. They are very popular especially on notebook systems with the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator solutions (GMA) combined with Intel processors.

PRO: solutions to manage personal productivity (office and Internet) and multimedia (for viewing videos in HD models in the past) without problems, ensuring very low power consumption that is not incommensurable with the mobility needs of ultra-portable notebook.
CONS: not able to manage complex video applications such as games or CAD programs.


Discrete graphics cards (or discrete) models are made by Nvidia GeForce and ATI Mobility Radeon that have GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) at frequencies too high combined with dedicated memory is often much faster than system memory. There are several models that provide very different services.

PRO: solutions generally able to manage, depending on the model, with more or less easy games and graphics programs, in addition to standard applications and high-definition video streams.
CONS: more expensive solutions, and more greedy in terms of consumption, which in fact reduce the autonomy of the notebook on which are mounted.


The performance of graphics cards are very different from each other and also vary depending on the games and applications: a good standard of comparison for the performance of laptop video cards is the benchmark 3D Mark 2006, that proposed by Futuremark in 2006, is still the gold standard for the performance of video cards:

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The results shown in table comparing video cards notebook are average values ​​registered users and online presence in the various tests, the laptop and also very different configurations. Scores can vary greatly depending on your operating system, processor coupled to the video card, and depending on the version of the video driver. It should also be taken into account that some video cards are on the market in configurations that provide different frequencies and different types of GPU and memory.