It is possible to increase the graphics card performance in a laptop by adding an external graphics card (eGPU), attached via Thunderbolt. Firstly, you can only upgrade the graphics card in a desktop computer, not a laptop. Providing your editing software supports hardware video acceleration (pretty much all popular editing packages do, with apps like DaVinci Resolve being heavily reliant on graphics card hardware) upgrading your computer's graphics card can give you a worthwhile performance boost when video editing.Ĭhoosing the right video card for you obviously depends on your budget, as well as the kind of computer you'll be upgrading.

Even a lower-mid-range card will give your editing rig a serious speed boost, with pricier video cards only yielding marginally superior performance. What's more, while spending top dollar on the very best graphics card will get you extra encoding performance, you really don't have to. It's actually rather more technical than that, but the upshot is a graphics card can export video a whole lot faster than even a top-end CPU. But even with 4, 6, 8, or even more cores, a CPU simply can't match the incredible power of a graphics card, which can contain thousands of processing cores. It used to be that video editing software relied solely on your computer's central processor (CPU) to process and export video.