What is a Graphics Card?

The Graphics card is responsible for delivering the image you see on your PC monitor. Its GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) processes the data and changes it into a signal to the monitor. There are many factors to a graphics card. Choosing one can be a tricky business these days as there is so much technology that is different in each new graphics card release. More of these later in the article.

Graphics Acceleration

When PC's first came and for some time after, the graphics cards purpose was only to display the image on the screen. The amount of memory you got on a graphics card was very small and was not needed to a great extent. Today's graphics cards do more than just display an image, they help the processor with the job of processing when it comes to the graphics. The graphics card would in effect accelerate the process of displaying the image on screen.

This was needed when the 3D gaming world took the centre stage. The speed required to process the images on screen at 60 frames per second and process the code for the game itself was simply too much for a CPU to handle on its own and so the games would simply crawl along at a very slow pace. The graphics card would use some of its own built in instruction logic to added things such as textures and lighting effects, fog effect and bump mapping to give a far more detailed picture. Also the speeds of graphics cards have improved a great deal in order to let these effects be used without the problem of the frame rate dropping.

Anti-Aliasing

One of the biggest improvements to graphics technology was nothing to do with an increase of speed or efficiency but with graphical improvements. Anti-aliasing was technology to allow jagged edges of computer sprites to be smoothed on screen by blending colours. Monitors have pixels which are rectangular by nature and are incapable of drawing a diagonal line without looking crooked. Anti-aliasing technology doesn't prevent this from happening but uses tricks of the eye in order to make images look smoother and more pleasing to the eye. Lots more information on Anti-Aliasing can be found in our Anti-Aliasing article