can i get a graphics card with no software?

Question

somebody told me that you can download software for a graphics card that kids your pc into thinking it has a card, although it doesn't and that it just uses RAM but allows you to play games as if you had a video card. is this true and where can i get one from?

Answer 1

Hardware CANNOT be downloaded. There is really no such thing. At best there are emulators for certain things (like console games), but there is no substitute for a video card.

Answer 2

Hmm. There might be a bit of software that does eulate a graphics processor, and send the output through your on-board graphics, but the performance would be diabolical and just isn't worth doing.

Not only would the actual image quality for rubbish, the performance of your system would plummet, as it would force the CPU and RAM to do far more work than was ever intended. You would not be able to play something like Battlefield 2 or Half-Life. You might get an image, but the frame rate would be, frankly, shite. Lag would be a massive problem as well.

The system would run very very hot, perform poorly.

If it does exist, and I have no reason to doubt that, I'd leave it alone if I was you and get yourself a decent graphics card. You can pick up a half-decent card for less than £100 these days - an AT X1650 Pro for example, which is more than adquate, retails for aound £85.

Answer 3

Search for “game emulators”. It seems that some are available to emulate games consoles on a PC. For these, the PC graphics card speed and facilities will no doubt still be important.

Windows includes software emulation facilities that allow some 3D games to be run when certain functions are not supported by the graphics hardware but these will be terribly slow. I would not trust any emulator.

Answer 4

A computer must have a graphics hardware device, so that graphic data can be processed and sent to the output device [monitor]. You have to hook the monitor up to the computer, so the computer has to have a port [socket] that accepts the monitor's plug, and this port is attached to a hardware device that outputs data to the monitor. So there is no software that will "kid" your computer into thinking it has a graphics device. If it doesn't have one, you can't even hook the monitor up to it.

Further, any software that is substituted for any graphics software drivers and that routes the graphics to be processed to RAM will be much less satisfactory than the hardware and its native drivers, as using RAM instead of the hardware, if that is really possible, would rob you of the RAM and rob you of the built in processing that goes on on the video card, and games would definitely not be all that playable.

Nobody in his right mind would consider any such product.

Answer 5

I'm not sure I fully understand your question. If you want to see video output you must have a video card to connect your monitor to, or a tuner card to connect a TV to. RAM is a different story in that some motherboards have BIOS that allows you to reserve a segment of your free RAM to be allocated as Video RAM.

If there is no video card you will typically fail the BIOS POST (power on self-test) and your machine locks up. The only way past this is if your box is configured to ignore video errors (such as a network box where you still see the text output of the box on a workstation).

Answer 6

even if something like that did exist, that still makes it impossible to play certian games. some features like vertex and pixel shaders, antialiasing, and other features are built in to graphics processors, meaning a standard processor cannot emulate a graphics processor because they are designed to process different kinds of information.

Answer 7

If you find it, let me know.