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The basic purpose of a video
card is to show you some visual information. It basically tells the
monitor or any other display device to light up specific pixels with
specific colors. These days most new motherboards are equipped with
a reasonable graphic card that is adequate for basic tasks and light
multimedia applications. However, if you are a serious gamer then
these built in graphic cards are inadequate.
Before 1996 video cards were
only meant to be fitted in the PCI slots. After 96 support for AGP
(Advanced Graphics Port) was added. The AGP pushed the gaming
experience to a much higher level by increasing the speed and
efficiency.
With the growth of gaming
industry 3D accelerator cards were introduced that produced
realistic visuals while supporting both 2D and 3D graphics. These
days high end graphic cards also support HDTV and multimedia
projectors as output devices.
Recently another interface for
graphic cards has emerged, PCI Express. PCI Express has the
advantage of being more efficient while using less power.
There are two types of graphic
cards i.e. Integrated and Expansion. Integrated cards are those that
are integrated on the motherboard. They mostly share some of the
system memory. These boards also have to option to increase or
decrease the amount of memory shared by the graphic card. Because
these cards do not have a dedicated CPU of their own, they use the
main processor. This leads to low quality graphics and a slowdown in
system performance.
Expansion cards have much better
performance than the integrated ones because of their own dedicated
processor (GPU-Graphics Processing Unit) and memory. With the
improvement of graphics cards in recent years, games have become
more realistic. High end graphics cards can make up a large part of
overall price of the system.
There
are a variety of options to consider while analyzing the performance
of a graphic card:
Clock
speed is the operating frequency of a video or graphic processing
unit. The clock speed is measured in megahertz.
If the
memory for the card is DDR-SDRAM instead of SDRAM than it will
operate at twice the frequency making it twice as faster as one with
SDRAM. There is another new technology for the memory GDDR3 which
offers a extreme gaming experience.
As far
as the memory architecture goes; it is either in a 128-bit or
256-bit setup.
Memory size plays an important
role with system. With memory sizes e.g. 128 MB, 256 MB, 512 MB etc.
Greater memory offers the ability to load more textures into memory
to provide a more detailed gaming environment. |
