Better Graphics, Better Experience
While you don't need a $500 graphics board to run Microsoft Word smoothly, an old card or integrated graphics can affect overall system performance and even your productivity. For instance, integrated graphics draw on main system memory to do the job, which leaves your PC with fewer overall resources.
Our Dell Dimension 5150 test machine used Intel's latest integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 950, part of the Intel 945G Express chip set, yet we still saw modest performance gains by upgrading to basic, $100 cards. XFX's value GeForce 6600 with 256MB of DDR2 RAM upped performance by about 7 percent in the Mozilla Web-browser component of our WorldBench 5 tests. The difference in our gaming tests was even more notable. See "$100 Cards Bump Up Performance, on a Budget" for the lowdown.
Another way that a good graphics card can improve your productivity is through dual-monitor support. Few integrated graphics chips or entry-level cards can take advantage of Windows XP's ability to spread a desktop over two monitors, which is too bad: A 2004 study by the University of Utah entitled "Productivity and Multi-Screen Computer Displays" found that people complete common business tasks in spreadsheets and word processing programs more quickly and accurately when they use dual monitors.
Whether you're connecting to one or two monitors, another limiting factor of your old graphics setup may be the connections it has: Most systems with integrated graphics don't offer DVI connections, which allow you to use the digital interface of most LCD monitors to get the best possible image quality.
It's also worth noting that high-end video editing apps such as Pinnacle Studio and Adobe Premier Pro can leverage a dedicated graphics card's GPU and memory to improve render times on some effects. If you're interested in editing high-definition video, Pinnacle Studio 10 requires at least 256MB of video memory.
A new card can also make DVDs and videos look better through built-in technologies--Avivo in ATI's newest chips, and PureVideo in nVidia's. Among other things, these technologies handle images much the way high-end DVD players do, processing images to deinterlace them (removing jittery effects you sometimes see in fast-moving video) and to scale them to fit the screen or window better.
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