Interest on having a powerful discrete graphic card ?

[w7l2050]

Hello there,

I just want to know if this is interesting to have a powerful graphic card (AMD Radeon HD 6000 or 7000 // Nvidia GTX500) in place of an integrated chipset (Intel HD 2000+) ?
So are there some improvements in speed or quality between discrete and integrated GPU ?

Because i have a Intel HD2000 (Core i3-2100) and it works great but I experienced some troubles in fullscreen (Explain in other topic).

Thanks by advance for your answer.

[mpack]

A graphics card is installed on your host and makes a performance improvement - or not - there. If a performance boost happens then all applications running on that host will benefit - including VirtualBox, which is not special in this regard.

Whether or not a particular graphics card indeed gives a worthwhile performance boost, I suggest you check out hardware review sites for that.

Certain features in VirtualBox are not available if your host graphics doesn't support them, but that usually isn't worth thinking about because all PCs for the last several years will have those features, including PCs with onboard graphics. Also VirtualBox features can be lost due to buggy graphics drivers (onboard or not), but it isn't possible to talk generically about those cases.

[w7l2050]

Thank you very much for your answer.

I asked that because I will update my PC and because I experienced an annoying ghost effect when moving cursor in window mode with Intel HD Graphics 2000 (Integrated GPU in core i3-2100).

So, I thought what is better : Change CPU or GPU to avoid this ghost effect and to have a better general experience ?

Another question : are there virtual benchmarks to compare CPU and GPU like Passmark do for real hardware ? If not, it could be interesting to do one, to know what is the best hardware (CPU + GPU) to help users like me. I could do that : CPU = wprime, GPU = ???, HDD = CrystalDiskMark.

Thank you very much.

[Technologov]

I don't understand your question.

Really only benefit of having NVIDIA over Intel GPU here is drivers quality of NVIDIA.
As for performance -- it doesn't matter, as in either case VBox is dog-slow in all modern games. Old 3D games (year ~2001) may work however with both GPUs.

And no - there is no benchmark for virtual systems - use normal benchmarks instead (3D Mark 2001, PassMark, ...)

[w7l2050]

Thank you for your answer.

I just want to know if, for graphics in virtualbox (not games), a Nvidia GTX (or Radeon HD7000) is faster than Intel Graphics HD2000 ?

Like it seems that there are no benchmark to compare general use (in virtualbox) between discrete or integrated card, I just want to have a comparing point to know if in reality there is an advantage in using one or the other ?

[stefan.becker]

If the graphic on the host its faster, guests will be faster too.

But it does not change the vga capabilties compared to native access.

[w7l2050]

Great answer, thank you.

So, if I understand right, the more powerful the graphic card will be, the more reponsesivness the virtual machine will be.