Screen or graphic card in a laptop: which is more important?

 

Everyone always focuses on the graphics card or processor when buying a new laptop or desktop. It is legitimate for them because they will pay a not small amount at all for good processing power, but what is the use of power if you do not use it?

 

Imagine that you are studying data analysis in order to eventually work on programming smartphone applications. What's the point of studying all this in order to do something completely different from the field you studied for? This is the same idea as putting the best gear possible with a screen you can't take advantage of.

 

NVIDIA cards are the best, and they might be the victim of this problem

 

Nowadays most people are looking for NVIDIA GeForce RTX series cards, be it the RTX-30 or the new RTX-40, to be the card that does everything related to graphics in their machines.

 

But if you ask us, in terms of gameplay, we will tell you that it is the best because of the quality of the graphics that it produces with RTX technologies, such as dazzling lighting simulation and similar effects that you will only find in NVIDIA cards only with this excellent quality, which does not affect performance in the same way that we see with other cards.

 

But even if we move away from ray tracing technologies, NVIDIA cards are still leading in their class in the hardware they offer in order to play at high frame rates, whether with AAA games or esports. This is purely a processing story, and what NVIDIA cards do with the process causes it to produce over 100 frames per second with hundreds of titles.

 

What are the potential disasters you might face?

 

There are a lot of scenarios that can happen because of the screen. We will choose three scenarios in particular that will be catastrophic, which we will review in today's article.

 

Faded screen

 

Buying a monitor with poor color coverage or working with a panel that can't deliver the best possible colors is an injustice to any powerful graphics card. Let me make it easier for you and tell you that getting a TN panel monitor will not be acceptable anymore and that getting a VA or IPS monitor with limited color coverage at the sRGB level will not be acceptable either.

 

The idea with these screens is that they will not cover the colors as well as possible, which makes the colors very faded as if you washed your screen in an automatic washing machine. Don't do this to test if your screen is good, that's purely metaphorical.

 

But the idea arrived, there are many degrees of colors that cannot be displayed on TN screens, which makes the experience with AAA games, whether with or without ray tracing, it will be bad. The same applies to IPS and VA screens, but these screens are generally characterized by better color coverage, but they are not all the same in the same coverage.

 

Try to choose a screen with color coverage starting from 99% of sRGB colors in order to get a good experience using the graphics card hardware and the features it offers you.

 

Low refresh rate screen

 

There are a lot of devices that we wouldn't say it's the wrong combination, but we will say it's a more economical combination for laptops and the wrong combination for desktops. The wrong combination that we are talking about is putting a screen that does not fit the hardware in terms of refresh rate.

 

Let's say you now have a card like a GeForce RTX 3060, which is considered one of the best mid-range cards, which can provide you with an average of 60 frames per second with AAA games and a rate of more than 100 frames per second with esports games.

 

Imagine that you can get 100 FPS in games that need every FPS in order to capture your enemy. That's great, sure, but it wouldn't be great if your laptop or desktop monitor had a refresh rate that couldn't show you all of this. I'm talking about all 60 Hz screens here.

 

The professional gamer wants as many frames as possible, and the casual gamer wants the best graphical experience and as many frames as possible. We can say that it is a common factor for all types of players, and when you do not get all the tires that you can get, you are not taking advantage of everything that is offered to you.

 

This is why you should always focus on getting a screen that provides you, at least, with a 120 Hz refresh rate that can give you 120 frames per second as the maximum number of frames displayed.

 

A screen that slows down the experience, or rather delays it

 

You may have the best refresh rate and best color screen, but the screen response time can make it worse. The higher the response time, the slower the color change of the pixels, and this slowness makes fast motion look like it's happening in the Moroccan desert due to the blur effect.

 

This is because the screen itself has a long response time, and nothing wrong with the card. There are screens with the same specifications except for the response time, and you will find that the experience difference between the short and long response times is very noticeable, especially with fast games.

 

But this affects not only the image. The picture will not be the best for AAA players and Esports games, but the crisis that Esports players will face in particular will be due to the presence of a very important feature that no one will be able to exploit due to the screen response time.

 

This technology is NVIDIA Reflex which is already added to NVIDIA hardware that starts with GTX-10 cards and gets better with newer cards. The idea is that the technology speeds up the command from your keyboard or mouse to the screen itself, and of course, running this technology will not be rewarding if the screen comes with a high response time that misses the advantage that you will get from the technology.

 

Try to find a monitor with a maximum response time of 4ms, because you will feel everything at a number higher than this.