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History Lesson: The first graphics cards were
introduced in August of 1981 by IBM. These were monochrome
cards called Monochrome Display Adapters (MDAs). These displays
were typically only green or white text on a black background.
Major Chipsets
NVidia
ATI
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The are three basic components of a graphics
card are:
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Motherboard Interface - Most graphics
cards are added separately to the motherboard as either an AGP
(Accelerated Graphics Port) card or a PCI (Peripheral
Interconnect Component) card. But sometimes they can be
integrated onto the board itself. Once connected, the
card becomes a part of the syytem's bus and can communicate
with the CPU.
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Memory - Graphics cards have memory on
the card. The memory holds the color of each pixel. The
more memory you have on the card, the faster the card will
become.
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Video Interface - Most newer models
will have a rectangular port on the that is called a DVI-I
connector. This is for digital CRT or flat panel
monitors. The most common connector is a 15 pin VGA for
analog CRT. Specialty cards may have an S-video
connector to hook up a VCR or television.
Modern graphics cards have their own high-power
central processing unit (CPU) that is optimized for graphics
operations. Most are considered graphics accelerators, which
take the burden off of the CPU by completing graphic-intensive
instructions provided by the processor.
AGP: Most modern boards support this
graphics interface. This is a modification of the PCI bus
and was designed to increase the throughput of graphics. It
is able to achieve this because there are no other devices that
share this bus. AGP is a 32-bit bus with a clock rate of 66
megahertz. It can transfer 32-bits of data in one second 66
million times.
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