How to choose the right video card
Introduction
A video card, otherwise known as a video adaptor, display adaptor, graphics adaptor or graphics card, is an expansion card that allows a computer to send graphic information to a monitor, or similar display device. Aside from a physical connection to a display device – traditionally VGA (“Video Graphics Array”), adopted in the Eighties, but more recently also VIVO (“Video In Video Out”), DVI (“Digital Video Interface”) and HDMI (“High Definition Multimedia Interface”) – the other necessary components of a video card are a motherboard connection, a processor and memory. The card receives graphical data from the CPU (“Central Processing Unit”), processes that data to determine how each picture element, or “pixel”, on the display is to be used and sends that information to the display. Video memory is an important component of a video card because the speed with which data can be written to and read from video memory determines system performance. Various video memory technologies are currently in use, so you may come across abbreviations such as DRAM (“Dynamic Random Access Memory”), VRAM (“Video RAM”), WRAM (“Window RAM”), etc., in relation to video cards.
Video Card Features, Considerations, Etc.
Requirements for a video card depend, largely, on the applications for which the system to which it is connected is used. Everyday home and office applications such as word processing, e-mail, Internet browsing require only two dimensional, or 2D, graphics capability, so many modern computers do not have a video card, per se, but a GPU (“Graphics Processing Unit”) integrated into the motherboard instead. This means that graphics capability is limited, but also reduces the price of the system, overall, so it is often a good choice for home or office users who are not interested in three dimensional, or 3D, graphics capability.
Anyone who works with 3D graphics, on the other hand, or anyone with more than a passing interest in computer gaming, will benefit from the extra power of a high-end video card. Indeed, the popularity of computer gaming has been the driving force behind the growth of the video card industry and the latest video cards are equipped with advanced features to meet the current and future requirements of computer games. These advanced features include support for graphics effects such as anti-aliasing, a method of fooling the eye that jagged edges are smooth, Z-buffering, a method of drawing 3D objects correctly, vertex shaders, which allow the data describing a vertex (a coordinate in a 2D or 3D space) to be manipulated, etc. The frames per second, or FPS, rate of video card – that is, the number of complete images, or “frames”, that it can display per second – is an indication of its overall performance; the human eye can process 25, or so, frames per second, but the fastest cards, nowadays, offer anything up to 60, or 70 FPS, with DirectX 10 or DirectX 11.
Video cards are now also included in digital photo frames, which are, after all, rudimentary computers, so that you can display digital photographs, slideshows, video clips, etc. on an external display, such as a monitor or TV.
