If you use a PC, Mac or Laptop then you will have some sort of graphics card. The graphics card is used to display the visual representation of content on a computers screen using a large grid of transistors; these transistors will each display a pixel of the represented content according to the display map for the respective image. These graphics cards can vary in price and quality; if you are wanting to use a computer for gaming then you will need a high spec graphics card to ensure the game will load and perform adequately according to the specification of the card verses the minimum requirements of the game. Most games will tell you the minimum requirements for the graphics card to ensure trouble free game play.

Some computers use a shared graphics memory and CPU, which means that the memory assigned to the graphics card, and processes are shared with general computing tasks of the CPU, so not fully dedicated to graphics (gaming/playing videos etc). A dedicated graphics card however, has it’s own GPU, and a set amount of memory integrated onto the card specifically for graphics heavy tasks, such as gaming; this means that you will always have a dedicated GPU for processing graphics related tasks, and enough memory on the graphics card to play games whilst the main CPU is running other general computing tasks.