New Laptop - Graphics Card question?

[onlye]

Replacing my laptop and trying to determine if adding discrete grahpics will have any impact on Xara performance. I currently use an i7 quad core, 8GB ram and SSD drive with the integrated graphics. Performance for Xara is fine. Looking at similar but with an Nvidia card with 4GB of ram. I have read a number of articles with many saying that graphics option will only really benefit game play. (which I don't do) The only other program I use that might benefit is Magix Movie Edit Pro where I think rendering times would improve.

Comments appreciated. Apologies if this is in the wrong Forum.

Thanks,

[PhilM]

A graphics card won't help Designer directly very much (I'm afraid) but programs are increasingly making use of the hardware on graphics cards and that includes Windows itself.

3d design software, such as Sketchup, unsurprisingly makes best use of the 3d hardware on the desktop.

So if you can afford it, a capable 3d graphics card may be useful in the future, even if it's not used by all your software now.

Phil

[handrawn]

I don't use MME but I do use Toon Boom Harmony - TB recommend minimum GTX 1070 - graphics card certainly has an effect on rendering times with this program...

[Pommes]

To my knowledge, a graphic card isn't really important for rendering. More RAM and the stronger processor will help more.

[handrawn]

that depends on whether the program is using just the CPU or the CPU and the GPU

[handrawn]

ok I checked in respect of Toon Boom - GPU/RAM is important for rendering work in progress - it may be that rendering out is CPU only as that does not show on screen [but some systems can leverage GPU to perform CPU tasks]- it all depends on what rendering you are talking about...