I’m looking at buying a cheap laptop for school. The most performance-intensive things I’ll be doing with it are running Photoshop Elements 7, and watching videos. Among the system requirements for PSE7 is a “Color monitor with 16-bit color video card”.
What does the 16-bit part mean exactly? Many of the cheap laptops I am looking at have integrated graphics processors like this one. The thing is, under “memory bus width” it lists 0 bits and 0 MB max memory. It mentions in the description: “The chip has no dedicated graphics memory, but takes dynamically an amount from the main memory (up to 384 MB).”
What does this mean, and will an integrated GPU such as this one be OK to do the tasks I want smoothly? (we will assume all the other specs are met, such as processor speed and system memory)
16-bit color means that the video card should be able to represent color within a single pixel with 16 bits of information.
Most modern video cards (and even integrated ones) support 24 bit color (with another 8 bits for other alpha/z data) - 32 bit color.
So you’re fine, although an integrated card with some of it’s own video memory to work with will serve you better when editing large image files or video. This is because 1, your video card will consume system resources by using more system memory when it has to keep things in the buffer (like a large picture, or a number of large pictures), and 2, using system ram instead of faster (and closer to the GPU) local ram is obviously going to be slower.
If you’re doing photoshop, you probably want to find the extra $150-200 for a laptop with what’s called a “discrete” video card with its own onboard memory.