How come if you want a video card for a Windows desktop you are looking at something that eats a lot of power and often requires substantial additional memory - yet android laptops and TV sticks perform essentially the same function with little power and memory?
Is the Windows OS that wasteful?
Yup, its those cheap hardware video cards that make the OS do it all, most likely found in winders!
Jamie
IN the old days, a video card was a video card, it provided that function, it was on a separate card because there were multiple standards, and that kept on.
Then later, a wave of fancier video cards came along, able to do all kind of things onboard, so they needed extra memory and a lot more smarts. INitially, you could choose, those of us not needing any real power just got a generic VGA card, those doing gaming or fancy graphics spent a lot of money on the fancier card.
Then later, in order to make computers cheaper, the video card function was combined on the motherboard. No need for an extra card, but it ran slower, and used regular RAM (which had its own issues, but if nothing else took RAM away from the computer). For many people, that was acceptable, so special video cards slots started disappearing, and the generic video cards faded, leaving only the expensive and fancy video cards. When I got this 3GHZ Pentium used a couple of years ago, I was disappointed that it had no special video slot, so I couldn't use one of the fancy video cards I'd accumulated when others had discarded them (though my only real need for a video card was because I had one, so I might as well use it).
Tablets and notebooks tend to include built in video (just as audio has become built into the motherboard, when in the old days that too was an extra card; look at a computer now, and there's hardly any expansion slots, a reflection of more of it now being built in, and the change to USB to replace serial and parallel interfaces). If you pay enough, you get much better function, if not, it's still relatively low level.
What you are really seeing is the loss of the low level video cards, so if you want or have to buy one, you end up having to overbuy, though for most people the only reason for a special video card is because you are in need of really high performance.
Keep in mind that most tv sets are now computers. Both my LCD DTV sets run Linux.
Michael
No, it's the computer shop that would prefer to sell you a $200 card with lots of ram and a large processor over selling you a $20 one with a few megabytes of ram and no GPU.
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YES
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