Graphics Card

Graphics card / Video card puts your picture on the monitor. Individual graphics cards are available for different types of graphical uses. The graphics card itself has its own processor and memory. This will reduce the load on the main processor and allow it to perform other tasks. The memory on a graphics card is used to store the individual frames that make up a seemingly continuos scene. The frames are made up of pixels and are encoded in a colour according to its resolution. The resolution can also mean the size or finest of the actual screen.

The more memory on a graphics card means it can hold more colour variations per frame and or more pixels per frame. You have probably seen the available adjustments for your graphics card, giving options like 256color, 16bit color, 24bit color and true color. The more "bits" (see Binary) you use then the more combinations of colour you can get. 256color require 8"bits" and 16"bits" can produce 65536 colour combinations. Newer graphics cards are mainly only available for the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slot. The AGP slot is a dedicated slot for the graphics card only. Older graphics cards used the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slot. You can use both slots together and run two monitors from your computer.

Apart from the separate graphics card, you can get onboard graphics. Onboard graphics is "onboard" the motherboard, it works in the same way but uses part of your system memory to store the data. Very few onboard graphics have their dedicate memory to use. You can still use a separate graphics card instead of the onboard graphics. Not many motherboards with onboard graphics gives you an AGP slot so you have to use a PCI slot graphics card.