Home > Graphics card

A graphics card or video card is a component of a computer which is designed to convert a logical representation of an image stored in memory to a signal that can be used as input for a display medium, most often a monitor utilising a variety of display standards. Typically, it also provides functionality to manipulate the logical image in memory.

As was in the past, many graphics cards are standalone devices, attached to a motherboard via the ISA, PCI, VESA, or AGP buses, with recently-introduced PCI-Express expected to be prominent in the future.

Increasingly, however, the graphics card is no longer a "card" in the strictest sense, but is an integrated section of the motherboard dedicated to the same purpose. But since integrated-graphics-displays usually have inferior performance compared with standalone graphics cards (due to using cheaper chipsets and sharing system memoryThe terms storage ( U. or memory ( U. refer to the parts of a digital computer that retain physical state ( data) for some interval of time, possibly even after electrical power to the computer is turned off. The anthropomorphic term memory has been used rather than using dedicated memory), those who require high performance still prefer non-integrated solutions.

These more powerful graphics cards, usually geared toward displaying 3D graphics for gamesA computer game is any sort of game that is played using a computer. General Although often associated, computer games are not necessarily video games although all but the earliest video games (such as Pong, which used dedicated analogue circuitry) are co, are still card-based. Their processing engines are sometimes called GPUA Graphics Processing Unit or GPU also called Visual Processing Unit or VPU is the microprocessor of a graphics card (or graphics accelerator). Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics. The name Graphics Processing Us (graphics processing units). The longterm goal of graphics cards manufacturers (and game developers) appears to be realtime photorealistic rendering. New products and technologies are often touted to provide "Hollywood quality" - 3dfx3dfx Interactive was a company which specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics cards and graphics processing units. Initially dominating the field, by late 2000 it underwent one of the most high-profile demises in the history of the PC industry. used claims of movie-quality effects to promote their Voodoo 5The Voodoo5 5500 was the last, most powerful graphics card 3dfx ever released. It sported two VSA-100 chips (VooDoo Scalable Architecture), each running at 166 MHz. It sported 64 MB SDRAM also running at 166 MHz. However, each processor had 32 MB VRAM ded cards with T-Buffer technology, allowing motion blurMotion blur is the apparent streaking of rapidly moving objects in a still image or a sequence of images such as a movie or animation. When an image of moving objects or from a moving camera is created it does not always merely represent a single instant, depth of fieldIn film and photography, the depth of field is the distance in front of and behind the subject which appears to be in focus. For any given lens setting, there is only one distance at which a subject is in focus, but focus falls off gradually on either sid and full screen anti-aliasing effects. nVidia talked about "The dawn of cinematic computing" when introducing its GeForce FX chip with the Dawn technology demo.

Conversely, sometimes 3D-graphics capabilities are not relevant to the choice of high-performance graphics card; 2D graphics and fine visual-quality fill specialised niches in areas such as medical imaging.

Analog computer monitors are usually connected to the graphics card via a VGA connector. Digital computer monitors are connected to the graphics card via a DVI connector.