The graphic card helps in generating images for the display. Graphics card is known by many names like video card, video adapter, display adapter and graphics accelerator. These video cards offer many additional functions like 3D and 2D video captures. The modern form of a graphic card is printed circuit board.
Some Important Components of Graphic Cards
The printed circuit board has many components like graphic processing units, video BIOS, video memory and RAMDAC. The graphic processing unit is used to optimize. This unit is capable of performing floating point computations which are essential for the 3D graphic display. The primary feature of GPU is its clock frequency which is usually between 250 MHz to 4 GHz. Another essential characteristic is vertical shaders, which helps to translate a 3D image into a 2D image. This 2D image is formed due to the presence of pixels. Video BIOS is a program which helps in providing instructions to the PC and software so that they can communicate with the graphic card. This BIOS card contains many different kinds of information like speed, the timing of the memory, voltage of the graphic and RAM. Next is the video memory. The memory capacity of different cards is different. However, generally speaking, if we see the modern memory range is 128 MB to 4GB. Next component is RAMDAC random access memory digital to analog converter. Let’s read further and know how graphic card works.
Working of the Graphic Card
The image which is displayed on your monitor is made up of petite dots which are re
ferred to as a pixel. The screen can display million of pixels; the PC, in turn, has to make a decision about how to deal with them. For this purpose, it requires a translator. The translator would convert the binary data coming from the central processing unit into a picture. If the computers have built in a graphic card this translation would occur in it. The job of the graphic card is really complicated. In order to make a 3D image, the graphic card generates a wire frame out of straight line. Then it fills in the remaining image, add in it color, texture, and light. For very fast velocity games a PC has to repeat this almost sixty times a second. This task is competed using our main parts of a PC, processor, mother board, memory, and monitor.
Tips on Buying Graphic Card
When you want to buy a graphic card for your PC, it is important to bear in mind few things. Some important points to consider are buying a graphic card which shows the best motion, a monitor can hold up. The LCD technology requires native resolution, however, this is not the case with cathode ray tube. For this reason, make sure that the graphic card you buy is capable of supporting high resolution. The second important consideration is on board memory requirement. The graphic card has to work much harder to take images to the screen. The data contained in graphic files is much more than that contained in text files. Therefore the amount of work and time needed by the graphic cards is much higher. A high-speed graphic card has its own memory so that it may not need to depend on random access memory. Some graphic cards which are not really efficient have very low memory. For this reason, buy a memory card which has a quality of on board memory. However, it cannot be concluded from here that the memory card that shares memory can not perform well. However, this depends on the PC and the amount of RAM it has. The system which has additional RAM is more compatible to be used with this kind of graphic card.
It also depends on the graphic/multimedia requirements and its users. If a user is the professional game player, professional video editor, it will require the heavy graphic card, any ordinary graphic card will not work. Graphics card that has a minimum of 500 MB dedicated memory can work, cards are available in different memories from 500mb to 2Gb depending on requirements.