Computer Graphics Cards
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A graphics card, video card, v card, video board, video display board, display adapter, video adapter, or graphics adapter [1] is a component of a computer which is designed to convert a logical representation of an image stored in memory to a signal that can be used as input for a display medium, most often a monitor utilizing a variety of display standards. Typically, it also provides functionality to manipulate the logical image in memory. The graphics card may be a stand-alone expansion card, hence the name, but is often also built into the computer.
In today's OEM computer market, however, graphics cards are usually substituted with an integrated graphics chip on a section of the motherboard. Integrated-graphics-displays typically have inferior 3D performance compared with dedicated graphics cards due to using cheaper chipsets and sharing system memory rather than using dedicated memory (though this is not always the case, as evidenced in some modern laptop architectures); those who require high performance still prefer non-integrated solutions.
Integrated graphics displays have gradually become more common in pre-built computer systems since the mid 1990s as computer manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell look for ways to cut costs while still providing basic video support. In terms of office tasks, web-browsing, email and similar computer activites, integrated graphics displays are a more practical solution than high-powered 3D graphics cards.
The most powerful graphics hardware, usually geared towards 3D graphics for games, is card-based. Their processing engines are sometimes called GPUs (graphics processing units), or, most commonly used by ATI, VPU's (Visual Processing Units). The longterm goal of graphics cards manufacturers (and game developers) appears to be realtime photorealistic rendering. New products and technologies are often touted to provide "Hollywood quality" - 3dfx used claims of movie-quality effects to promote their Voodoo 5 cards with T-Buffer technology, allowing motion blur, depth of field and full screen anti-aliasing effects. nVIDIA talked about "the dawn of cinematic computing" when introducing its GeForce FX chip with the Dawn technology demo. Others use the new technology for more stylised and unique but unrealistic rendering, such as cel shading.
Conversely, sometimes 3D-graphics capabilities are not relevant to the choice of high-performance graphics card; 2D graphics and fine visual-quality fill specialised niches in areas such as medical imaging.
The original hardware accelerated 3D renderers came on a board that was used in conjunction with a normal graphics card. The cards added 3D graphics to the 2D rendering from the graphics card via a pass-through cable. The first consumer-level 3D hardware was the Millenium from Matrox, although its 3D acceleration capabilities were meagre by todays standards, it was the first card to introduce hardware 3D graphics acceleration.
3D cards for model rendering in art and animation use different cards than those used for games. nVIDIA's "Quadro" series, which can cost upwards of a thousand dollars, is geared toward rendering and 3D animation, while the GeForce series is meant for gaming and actually performs much faster at a lower price. Both rendering cards and gaming cards may use similar hardware, the main difference being that the drivers and firmware of the rendering cards are optimized for precision, while the gaming cards are optimized for performance. A digital or analog monitor may be connected to the graphics card via a DVI connector or VGA connector respectively. Increasingly, the higher end cards offer dual DVI outputs for use with 2 or more digital displays, while maintaining analog compatibility by bundling DVI-VGA converter dongles with the cards.