What video cards do and why you need them.

Video cards are internal pieces of computer hardware that work between your motherboard and monitor.

Its job is to communicate between the motherboard and the monitor so you can see what you are meant to see.

It can be a PCI card which plugs into your motherboard and connects to the back of your computer. Or it can be built into the motherboard too, this means it is integrated video.


A graphics card with higher memory capacity improves the speed of your PC, and as a result is able to show images at a much faster rate than if it were a lower capacity card. The faster your card, the more the CPU can focus on the other things it needs to do.

If you have a graphics card rated at 64MB RAM (random access memory) for instance, it can easily run movies without hesitation, but a 16MB video card, on the other hand, will appear 'jerky' and often hesitates when the movie plays or might not play the movie at all.

Above all, you need some type of graphics card in your computer in order to see anything on the monitor.

However, the video grahpics card is but one component that is needed to see something on your screen.

The monitor is what actually provides the images you see ... while the CPU computes what you are going to see. Meanwhile the video card translates for the processor and puts it into a form the monitor understands and can display.

Years ago, older cards were not really designed to cope with large amount of graphic data.

When graphical based operating systems, like Windows, came to be, huge amounts of data needed to be moved on screen, and the CPU was under enormous pressure to process windows, intensive graphics, etc.




As a result, the processor was often bogged down which caused PC performance to degrade. To fix this computer companies began manufacturing cards called accelerators.

Graphic Accelerators were video cards that were able to do much of the calculations previously done by the processor.

With an accelerator, the CPU doesn't need to figure out where or how to draw something on the screen. Instead it sends a request to the accelerator - "draw this at these locations" and it would then handle the task. Now, virtually every modern graphics card has acceleration included.

Click here to browse the different types of Video/Graphics Cards to find the best one for your needs.




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