Gamer's hands on a PC keyboard
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All computers accept graphics hardware that handles everything from displaying your desktop and decoding videos to rendering demanding PC games. Near mod PCs have graphics processing units (GPUs) made by Intel, NVIDIA, or AMD, but remembering which model yous have installed can be difficult.

While your calculator'due south CPU and RAM are also important, the GPU is usually the most disquisitional component when information technology comes to playing PC games. If y'all don't accept a powerful enough GPU, you can't play newer PC games—or you may have to play them with lower graphical settings.

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

On Windows 10, y'all can check your GPU information and usage details right from the Chore Manager. Right-click the taskbar from the bottom of your screen and select "Chore Managing director" or press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open up the task manager.

Option to open Task Manager from Windows 10's taskbar

On Windows 11, you lot can likewise press Ctrl+Shift+Esc or right-click the Start push button and cull "Chore Managing director."

From at that place, select the "Performance" tab at the top of the window—if you don't see the tabs, click "More Details." Cull "GPU 0" in the sidebar. The GPU's manufacturer and model proper name are displayed in the elevation-right corner of the window.

You'll also encounter other data, such every bit the amount of defended memory on your GPU, in this window. Windows 10's Task Manager displays your GPU usage here, and you can as well view GPU usage by application.

If your organisation has multiple GPUs, you lot'll likewise meet "GPU 1" and and so on here. Each represents a dissimilar physical GPU.

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

On older versions of Windows, such as Windows vii, you can find this data in the DirectX Diagnostic Tool. To open it, press Windows+R, type "dxdiag" into the Run dialog that appears, and press Enter.

Launching dxdiag from Windows 10's Run dialog

Click the "Display" tab and look at the "Proper noun" field in the "Device" section. Other statistics, such as the corporeality of video memory (VRAM) built into your GPU, are also listed here.

DirectX Diagnostic Tool showing name of computer's graphics card

If you take multiple GPUs in your system—for example, as in a laptop with a depression-power Intel GPU for employ on battery power and a high-power NVIDIA GPU for use while plugged in and gaming—y'all can control which GPU a game uses from Windows 10's Settings app. These controls are also built into the NVIDIA Control Panel.

RELATED: How to Monitor GPU Usage in the Windows Task Manager

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