Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "How Nvidia Won Graphics Cards" video.
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Just one small addition: When Intel pushed onboard graphics, where the graphics memory was part of the main memory of the CPU, it was thought that the video solution would actually be faster, since the CPU would have direct access to the frame buffer, as well as having all of the resources there to access it (cache, DMA, memory management, etc). The reason they lost that advantage in the long run was the dual advantages of VRAM or dual ported video ram, a ram that could both be read and written by the CPU at the same time as being serially read out to scan the video raster device, as well as the rise of the GPU, meaning that most of the low level video memory access was handled by a GPU on the video card that did the grunt work of drawing bits to the video ram. Thus Intel ran instead down the onboard video rabbit hole. Not only didn't they win the speed race with external video cards, but people began to notice that the onboard video solutions were sucking considerable CPU resources away from compute tasks. Thus the writing was on the wall. Later, gamers only knew the onboard video as that thing they had to flip a motherboard switch to disable when putting a graphics card in, and nowadays not even that. Its automatic.
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