PCs can game without a graphics card now, but they still cost a lot

Gaming without a separate graphics card is now realistic, but it will not make a gaming PC cheap. How-To Geek's Monica J. White argues that chips with built-in graphics have improved a lot, yet memory and storage prices keep the total high.

What changed

Built-in graphics, called integrated graphics, sit on the same chip as the processor. They used to be good enough for spreadsheets and little else. Now they handle far more. Benchmarks show AMD's Radeon 8060S running Battlefield 6 at over 80 frames per second and Cyberpunk 2077 at over 60. Frames per second measures how smooth a game looks. That is at 1080p, a common screen sharpness, and often with lowered settings.

The chips behind it

• AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395 includes Radeon 8060S graphics with 40 compute units.
• Intel's Core Ultra X9 388H includes an Arc B390 graphics section with 12 Xe3 cores.
• Nvidia's RTX Spark puts a processor and graphics on one chip, with up to 128GB of shared memory.

Why it still costs a lot

Built-in graphics share memory with the processor, and that memory has to be fast. This is one reason soldered RAM, which is fixed to the board and cannot be swapped, is so common. The Ryzen chip above uses a fast memory design that is not cheap to build. Small laptops and mini PCs also need good cooling in very little space.

For people building their own PC, going without a graphics card saves a few hundred dollars, depending on the card they would have bought. But RAM and SSD prices (an SSD is the storage drive) are still very high. The article says RAM prices have been a problem for over a year.

Where savings may show up

Prebuilt PCs, laptops and mini PCs may offer a better deal. The article says manufacturers have not fully passed rising part costs on to buyers. A finished device without a separate graphics card might therefore cost less. Even so, the author says almost any PC shopping trip is going to be pricey right now.

What happens next

Separate graphics cards are not going away. For serious gaming, the article says one is still required. Built-in graphics can now replace a card for people who do not game heavily, and even for some who sometimes do. The article text provided ends before it finishes comparing the two.