The Graphics Card Market and The Influence of Online Gaming

The latest trend taking the online gambling world by storm is the advent of live casino games. Usually, when you play a casino game on an online platform, you play against the computer, with the computer electronically dealing cards in blackjack and Baccarat or spinning the wheel for roulette. But playing in a live casino online is as similar to playing in a real-life casino you can get. The dealer is an actual, real person and the games – live roulette, live blackjack and live Baccarat – are played in real time. If you intend to play live casino games on your desktop PC at home, one important question is whether your PC has a suitably powerful graphics card to deal with the demands of a live video casino feed. Although the internal graphics processor that came with your PC may be able to handle live video streaming, your experience will be greatly enriched with a dedicated graphics card that can deal with sophisticated modern first-person games, such as Titanfall. One of the main issues you may encounter is whether your graphics card is powerful enough to cope with the frame rate refresh needed to be able to get the most out of a live casino game. If the card is not powerful enough, significant video lag will spoil the experience and put you at a considerable disadvantage if the screen keeps freezing when you are trying to place that crucial winning bet. With the advent of live casino gaming online, hardware manufacturers have been playing catch up with the technology they put in their latest graphics cards. As mentioned before, the most serious problem players encounter with social gaming is the dreaded issue of graphics lag, whereby the graphics processor cannot handle a live video feed and everything starts to slow down onscreen, usually just at the critical moment. Basically, your system just cannot produce enough Frames Per Second (FPS) to make everything feel nice and smooth. Whenever graphics lag happens, you will typically get a reduction in the responsiveness of your controls or there will be persistent glitches in video playback. Your actions will take a fraction longer to be reflected in the graphics on-screen because it takes your system a bit more time to create each new frame of graphics and send it to your monitor. Again it cannot be stressed enough how this issue could ruin your enjoyment of a live casino game. In an effort to combat this problem and as a result of the ever increasing need for faster graphics processing and better rendering, an arms race of sorts has developed between the major graphics card makers, such as NVIDIA and AMD. Over the last decade, these companies have been locked in a seemingly eternal conflict, as whenever one side gained an edge, the other swiftly responded. No video card remained the obvious king for more than a few months. Gamers had plenty of choice and could always count on the constant advancement of GPU performance and technology. It is a fascinating look at the history of the development of the graphics card and how this has been influenced by social gaming over the years and there have been several ‘eras’ of the evolution of the graphics card market from 1995 onwards. As often in life there is no such thing as a free ride and the continual increases in power of the graphics cards on the market have come at a price. Adding a graphics card will cause your system as a whole to consume more electrical power. The card will also generate a significant amount of heat which necessitates the need for a cooling fan to be added to the card. This fan will, depending on the card, add significant noise to your environment, which can prove an irritation for some gamers. So, it is decision time. You have decided to upgrade your PC with a dedicated graphics card, but where to start and how much should you spend to get the most out of your live casino games? There are so many different graphics cards available on the market, ranging from a few hundred pounds to the most powerful which can set you back a lot of money. A good recommendation if your budget will stretch a bit further is the nVidia GTX 770, which is powerful yet excellent value for money while offering strong gaming performance without being exorbitantly priced.