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The time has come for me to buy a new laptop. I use Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu) and nothing else. Out of my working hours I use my laptop to watch movies and sometimes I have to do video conversions with ffmpeg (yeap, a standalone compilation because I do NOT want avconv, but please don't start flame war, that is a completely different topic altogether).

I can buy a laptop with an integrated Intel video card as I have had until now, or I can choose a laptop with a GPU card (Nvidia, I think) which reduces battery life but allegedly has some advantages. What would be those advantages?

Windows users with GPU cards can see movies with on-the-fly frame interpolation. That is not possible in linux yet, as far as I know. And, if that is not possible, why would I want to have a laptop with a GPU card being an Ubuntu user? If the GPU card is only going to be a piece of plastic sucking extra milliwatts, I prefer to spare my money.

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First things that comes to my mind:

  • For playing games - you know Steam came to Linux also we have Wine.

  • For heavy programs that require 3D acceleration like Blender.

  • For watching 4k HD Movies.

  • Newer desktop environments like KDE and Unity offer advanced look and feel of the OS when you tweak the settings but for that you need good GPU.

Generally if you use your laptop only for work or browsing internet and watching normal Movies - you don't need one.

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  • Agreed, or if you use opencl/cuda based programs
    – hanetzer
    Apr 8, 2015 at 16:53
  • But right now in my core i3 with a standard intel video card, I can watch 1080p movies!
    – Mephisto
    Apr 8, 2015 at 20:12
  • Well any video card with at least 256 MB RAM can play 1080p. But if you want to watch 4k videos it is another story. That is what I wanted to say. I will edit my answer to make that clear.
    – Sh1d0w
    Apr 8, 2015 at 20:17
  • I just googled for "4k video" and, omg! I didn't know about such resolution. I guess you want that for your own movies or something. Commercial movies (blueray?) are not released in 4k, aren't they?
    – Mephisto
    Apr 8, 2015 at 22:38
  • Only few companies offer movies shot in 4k for now. You can read more here
    – Sh1d0w
    Apr 9, 2015 at 4:43

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