Could a slow graphics card affect Windows's performance?

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Could a slow graphics card cause slow performance in Windows? Obviously a graphics card is mostly used when playing video games, but do Windows and normal office apps (e.g. Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, email programs, etc) experience any benefits from having a fast card?

For example, the Dell Inspirion 546 seems to come with a reasonably fast CPU and 3GB of RAM but a very slow graphics card (the Radeon HD 3200), which also shares 256MB of system RAM. Could this cause slow downs in non-3D based applications?

Django Reinhardt

Posted 2013-01-04T01:59:28.217

Reputation: 4 183

Answers

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In Windows 7/Vista, just at the desktop, if you have Aero enabled, then yes. If the UI seems slow, try disabling it. Aero has 3D effects and will be accelerated by the GPU.

I would actually run the System Score and see what it is. That should give you a good idea of what the bottleneck is.

Matt

Posted 2013-01-04T01:59:28.217

Reputation: 5 109

Do you mean the Windows system score, or some other software? – Django Reinhardt – 2013-01-04T02:12:42.737

If you mean Windows score, then everything is 5.8 or higher apart from Windows Aero performance, which is 3.6. – Django Reinhardt – 2013-01-04T03:18:43.583

Yeah, that would indicate a graphics bottleneck. If Aero is enabled I would try running Windows with it off. However, I'd venture that the system will still be sluggish. Is this a fresh install and it's sluggish? – Matt – 2013-01-04T19:43:47.607

More or less. It's a cleaned up Dell Windows image. Not great, but I've pretty much removed everything extraneous. – Django Reinhardt – 2013-01-04T21:59:45.113

Update: We upgraded the graphics card and everything runs a lots smoother now! – Django Reinhardt – 2013-03-17T12:09:37.513

Asked: 2013-01-04T01:59:28.217

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Active: 2013-01-04T02:03:06.153