Whats wrong with an intel video card?

my laptop has an intel HD Graphics video card with 1696MB graphics memory.



i dont know alot about computers im not sure why its not as good as an Nvidia video card for playing video games.



the specs of my video card seem higher than that of the minimum requirements for pc games but sites that test if your pc will run a game say that i need to upgrade.



i dont understand. please help|||There is more to gaming than simply the amount of graphics memory.



Intel graphic cards are made just good enough to handle the more common computer usage, such as HD videos and the like. As a rule of thumb, their graphic adapters are about as good as an NVIDIA or ATI adapter from 5 years ago.



Most ATI and NVIDIA cards have DEDICATED graphics memory that is built into the adapter and is much faster than the SHARED graphics memory that the Intel uses. Shared memory means it takes some of your system RAM and uses that for video processing. The downfall is that the data has to travel much farther to get to the system RAM than the onboard dedicated memory on the higher end cards.



There is also a difference in clock speed, bandwidth, shaders, and pipeline width; but that is getting too deep.



The bottom line is that Intel does not specialize in video cards, whereas Nvidia does.|||Your card doesn't actually have 1696MB graphics memory. It has 0MB graphics memory. All of its memory is actually taken from your system RAM. In addition, graphics memory actually has very little to do with graphics card performance. A graphics card is essentially a many-core processor optimized for graphics work. Dedicated cards, such as the ones from Nvidia, can have several hundred cores. Your Intel card, which is integrated into the chipset, has fewer cores and is slower than every other card in its generation. Look at this comparison: on a widely used benchmark- the 3D Mark 05, the GeForce 320M. an integrated graphics card (so also low-end) Nvidia made for Apple , scores more than double what your Intel GMA HD does.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeFo…

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Graph…|||Here the bottom line.



Intel graphics stink for anything other than media "Video" and does a mediocre job of that.



The reason:



Nvidia and ATI have architecture's that Intel graphics cannot duplicate, and it's this architecture is implemented by every game programmer out there.



The following is straight from Intel"s mouth regarding this



Q:Can someone from intel give me an estimation of when GPA will support OpenGL?

I've searched the forums but haven't found any statement on this matter.



A:Hello,



Thanks for your interest in having Intel GPA support the OpenGL graphics API.



We've not announced any release dates at this time -- when we have more information on this topic we'll be posting it on these forums and in the Intel GPA FAQ.



Regards,



Neal





Hope that answers it for you .|||Intel graphic cards are probably the badest graphiic cards ever.



Why? Because a company can't be good at processors and graphic cards. For example, AMD makes good graphics card but bad processors.



Why does this happen? No idea. lol|||may be the games u play require a better graphics card than the one you have,ir else try reinstalling the graphics drivers from intel website