Video Card

Video card is used for generating and outputing images. Today, most video cards are connected to motherboards through either PCI, AGP or PCI Express interface.

When looking for a video card, we should look at the following specifics to access how good a video card really is:

GPU (Graphic Processing Unit):
A GPU is a dedicated graphic microprocessor and it is optimized for floating point computing, which is essential in 3D functions. AMD (acquired ATI in 2006) and Nvidia are two of best known GPU manufacturer today. Some people confuse the GPU manufacturer with the video card manufacturer. The most well known video card manufacturers include  ASUS, Gigabite, XFX, BFG and eVGA.

Video Memory:
If the video card is on board, it will share the RAM used by the computer. For example, if you have 256mb RAM and your onboard video card share 64mb, then the RAM left will only be 192mb. If the video card is not intergrated, then it has its own VRAM, which usually ranges from 128 to 1024MB. The VRAM is most commonly based on DDR and DDR2.

Video BIOS:
The Video BIOS is a chip that contains the basic program that governs the video card's operations and provides the instructions that allow the computer and software to interface with the card. It contains information on the memory timing, operating speeds and voltages of the processor and ram and other information.  

Outputs:
The most common ones are SVGA, DVI and S-Video