Gamer's hands on a PC keyboard
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All computers take graphics hardware that handles everything from displaying your desktop and decoding videos to rendering enervating PC games. Near modern PCs have graphics processing units (GPUs) made by Intel, NVIDIA, or AMD, just remembering which model you have installed can exist difficult.

While your computer'southward CPU and RAM are also important, the GPU is usually the nigh critical component when it comes to playing PC games. If y'all don't accept a powerful plenty GPU, you can't play newer PC games—or you lot may have to play them with lower graphical settings.

Some computers have low-power "onboard" or "integrated" graphics, while others accept powerful "dedicated" or "detached" graphics cards (sometimes chosen video cards.) Here's how to see what graphics hardware is in your Windows PC.

On Windows ten, you can cheque your GPU information and usage details right from the Task Managing director. Right-click the taskbar from the lesser of your screen and select "Task Director" or press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open the chore manager.

Option to open Task Manager from Windows 10's taskbar

On Windows xi, y'all tin also press Ctrl+Shift+Esc or right-click the Start push button and choose "Chore Manager."

From in that location, select the "Functioning" tab at the top of the window—if you lot don't see the tabs, click "More Details." Choose "GPU 0" in the sidebar. The GPU'due south manufacturer and model proper name are displayed in the top-right corner of the window.

You'll likewise see other information, such as the corporeality of dedicated memory on your GPU, in this window. Windows x'due south Chore Manager displays your GPU usage here, and y'all can likewise view GPU usage by application.

If your system has multiple GPUs, you'll also encounter "GPU 1" and and so on here. Each represents a dissimilar concrete GPU.

Name of computer's GPU shown in Windows 10's Task Manager

On older versions of Windows, such every bit Windows 7, you can find this information in the DirectX Diagnostic Tool. To open it, printing Windows+R, type "dxdiag" into the Run dialog that appears, and printing Enter.

Launching dxdiag from Windows 10's Run dialog

Click the "Brandish" tab and look at the "Name" field in the "Device" section. Other statistics, such as the amount of video memory (VRAM) built into your GPU, are besides listed here.

DirectX Diagnostic Tool showing name of computer's graphics card

If you lot have multiple GPUs in your system—for case, equally in a laptop with a low-power Intel GPU for utilize on battery power and a loftier-power NVIDIA GPU for use while plugged in and gaming—yous tin can control which GPU a game uses from Windows 10's Settings app. These controls are also built into the NVIDIA Control Console.

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