Does having a better GPU improve speed and performance in things

Maybe.

Can be used for rendering things that aren't games.
For example, if you had a Blender project you wanted to render, there's an option to select your gpu to handle the workload

To be honest navigating passed the AMD/Nvidia mid tier series of cards is a waste unless you're rendering something hefty. Or, are an enthusiast looking to push the envelope. As for your average gamer mid tier is all that you need.

>>59537200
Note: also, future proofing is a good idea, I think, so there's that.

>>59537124
Are we talking low power gpus vs integrated?
Because the Windows desktop, video playback, certain web apps and other programs such as Photoshop and Blender will be hardware accelerated and will benefit from having a GPU. Integrated graphics will do for the most part, but something low power like an 8800GT rebrand (read: GT710) will help.
If you're talking "will a RX480/1060 make my everyday usage better", answer is not really.

>>59537124

on a basic level... yes.

but on that basic level just about any gpu will achieve this.


on a more advanced level... maybe.

it depends on what your viewing, editing or interacting with. on the desktop there are lots of things that can use a GPU to get more done on the web... well to some degree yes. some things you may use can be accelerated but thats likely rare these days with the death of flash and the continual commitment to the web being agnostic and running on all systems

>>59537227

future proofing a PC is a complete waste of money.

Because of diminishing returns it's always cheaper to buy a system that "just cuts it" and upgrade later when the performance isn't adequate anymore.

>>59537124
The CPU, RAM and HDD quality dictate the speed of browsing through your system. The VGA works with graphics processing.
Perhaps 20 years ago it played a part in rendering eye-candy themes quicker, but today with the autistic-minimalistic design of everything, VGAs are mostly just to get video games going better.

If you count Compiz, then yeah, you need a good VGA.

OS no. Actually I would bet it rums better on intrgrayed Intel cards. Because optimisations.

>>59537124
Yes

compare a fucking integrated graphics chip to a GPU when playing 720p and above videos, you will notice.

>>59538775
In all fairness the current Iris iGPUs out of Intel are nothing to sniff at. I've got an Iris 540 pushing pixels for my Surface and it manages pretty damn well on video and even some light games at 1920x1200.

>>59537149
I bet you use a unaccelerated OS.

>>59537124
As mentioned, a GPU can be used to handle rendering in more advanced use cases, like fast processing of image and video data, as well as anything that needs brute parallelized processing to get stuff done, like simulations.

However using a dedicated GPU for basic tasks is just wasteful, so for things like rendering UI elements and web graphics, a low-power device like an iGPU is a better idea, and most laptops switch to using one in anything outside of games by default, or just use plain software rendering; CPUs are fast enough these days to not even really need the help of a GPU to render basic vector graphics.