Do I Need A Video Card to Play PC Games?

United States
March 17, 2009 12:08am CST
I want to download "Stalker" and "Counter Strike" as well as some other games to play on my computer but I need to know if I can play them without having to get a video card. I have a 2 gig processor and almost 1 gig random memory. I don't have a controller either. Does anyone have any suggestions on what it will take to get me started?
6 responses
• Australia
17 Mar 09
My best advice without knowing your system specs is just to download them and install them and see how they run. Your computer already has a video card.... you wouldn't be browsing the net without one. If you're not aware of it, then I'd say it's just a standard integrated card which came pre-installed on your system. I'm assuming your system was just a package? Maybe a HP or Dell? Counterstrike is really old, so even with a basic video card, you should be able to at least run it. And if you can't, when you try and run it, you'll get an error code which will tell you what's wrong.
1 person likes this
• Australia
17 Mar 09
If your computer can display anything at all on a screen: text, pictures, the mouse cursor...anything, then you have a graphics card. It actually is essential for more than displaying graphics, and no computer will run without one. Many do not have memory of their own ('dedicated memory"), but share your RAM, so that of your 1Gig ypu probably only have maybe 200-300 megs available to run programs. The more demanding the game, the more sluggish your performance becomes! A 2 Gigahertz processor is not very fast these days (I am writing this on a laptop using 4 Gigs RAM and a 2.5Gig processor), and the people who design and program games tend to push the performance of computers to the limits! You can easily check out the minimum requirements for esach of the games you are interested in, and if you join a forum or discussion group dedicated to each oine, you will soon find out how much more "grunt" you really need to enjoy the games, rather than just being able to run them.
• United States
18 Mar 09
Ok; here is the information on my video card: 32 mb ATI Rage 128 Ultra, 1024x768 with 32 bit color display. If this means anything to you can you please tell me where I stand on being able to play games? I can do a lot with windows but when it comes to graphics and gaming I am lost.
• Australia
20 Mar 09
Sounds like you won't have much trouble. Download them and start playing!
• Philippines
19 Mar 09
Considering that your RAM is almost 1 Gig you can maximized the settings of your built-in shared memory of your graphics and you can still play those games. But for you to be satisfied with smoothness of the graphics you need a video card.
• United States
19 Mar 09
Thanks for the info. That will work great for me then. I can go ahead and try a few games out and when I upgrade to a new computer I will be set. Thanks again.
• Singapore
17 Mar 09
All pcs have video cards in them, they just differ on how much memory they can hold. So yah, a video card is absolutely necessary to play games, but you already have that in your system, your concern would be the video memory. I believe counter strike has a minimum video memory requirement of 512mb(this is different from the RAM or Random Access Memory you mentioned), and it is recommended to have 2 GB RAM and 1GB video for the best gaming experience. I hope that helps, enjoy playing.
@mikhatri (120)
• India
17 Mar 09
HI, this is all based on the inbuilt graphcis properties of you computer, if you have a suffecient graphics memory or video memory so you can play the games, so just check out your on board graphical memory, if it is less the 128 mb then you have to buy a graphics card for playing games, because now a dayz the minimum requirment of graphics to run a game is 128 mb and more...
• India
17 Mar 09
hii there is no requirement of any other extra software for these games all you need is just video and graphics driver installed on your system.