VIDEO CARD What is video card?

Video Card-The video card is a circuit board that contains all the necessary circuitry for displaying the picture or images and graphics on your monitor.

Function of Video Card

Video Card is a computer chip you usually insert into your computer via a AGP slot inside of your computer (usually the same thing a sound card is in) the purpose of which to process images. if a computer does not have a video card the computer has to split the processing power between everything. but with a video card, the card processes the video instead of the computer, so you have better performance and better graphics on pretty much anything.

Types of Video Card

PCI or Peripheral Component Interconnect Express- is the most current, and fastest, of the video cards.

Picture of PCI Express

AGP Video Card

AGP or Accelerated Graphics Port is based on PCI, but is designed especially for the throughput demands of 3-D graphics. Rather than using the PCI bus for graphics data, AGP introduces a dedicated point-to-point channel so that the graphics controller can directly access main memory.

Picture of AGP Video Card

PCI Video Card

PCI or Peripheral Component Interconnect cards-are to slow to play any of the more advanced video games, or to show video

Picture of PCI Video Card

How Does A Video Card Work

Receiving Information from the Motherboard Video cards are put into a computer's CPU and are linked to both the monitor and the mother board. When graphics software is run or a game is played, the computer sends information to the video card that is take in by the card's graphics processing unit, or GPU. This data is in binary form, and the GPU converts it into analog form, which can be read by monitors. GPU's have different speeds and strengths depending on the make and model. Mediumrange video cards have a GPU that can run games for casual players, but more powerful GPUs are needed to run larger games and also are important for those working with heavy graphic images on other software.

Sending Information to the Monitor

A monitor cord runs from the video card to the computer monitor. Some video cards have dual ports so that they can hook up to two monitors and operate with both at the same time. The converted data is now in binary form and is sent to the computer screen, where first it is transferred as a series of lines and grids. This is for 3D imaging, a necessary step not needed for 2D images. Next, the pixels are colored and shaded to match the information received and they cover the grid to create a 3D image. For 2D images, the information immediately starts to color pixels and put them together to form a picture.

Video Card Brands (Graphics processing unit (GPU) AMD (no longer ATI)
Intel Matrox Graphics Nvidia PowerVR SiS Via (S3 Graphics division)