Video Card Drivers
A video card is the hardware component that is responsible for generating graphical output to a display device such as a monitor or a projector. It provides you with a visual or a graphical interface the enables you to manage and use software data. Video cards are also known as graphics accelerator card, display adapter, and graphics card.
Video cards are actually expansion cards that are connected to the motherboard to get advanced graphics. Generally, a motherboard comes with an inbuilt Graphic Processing Unit (GPU), which is useful and less expensive for users who do not have advanced graphic requirements. The first video card was launched by IBM in 1981. This card was called Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA). The MDA video card displayed only one color and supported 80 x 25 text-only display and had memory of 4 KB. Next, between the years 1981 and 1987 several standards of video cards were introduced. Some of the most popular ones were Color Graphics Adapter (CGA), Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA), and Multi-Color Graphics Adapter (MCGA). All these cards support 80 x 25 text-only display. The Graphic Mode display support varies for each card—CGA supports 640 x 200 Graphic mode display with 16 colors and has 16 KB memory, EGA supports 640 x 350 Graphic mode display with 16 colors and has 256 KB memory, and MCGA supports 320 x 200 Graphic mode display with 256 colors. Video Graphics Adapter (VGA) with specifications 720 x 400 text-only display, 640 x 480 Graphic mode display, 256 colors and 256 KB memory was launched in 1987 and was widely accepted by users. This led companies such as S3, Cirrus Logic and ATI to improvise VGA by enhancing its resolution and number of colors it supported. This gave birth to the Super VGA (SVGA) standard. This card supported 1024 X 768 resolutions at 256 color mode and comprised 2 MB video memory. The evolution of video cards reached its peak in 1995 when manufacturers such as Creative, Matrox, S3 and ATI released 2D and 3D cards for users. All these cards were based on the SVGA standard to which 2D or 3D capabilities were incorporated. Since, then there has been no looking back for video cards. In 1997, 3dfx released the Voodoo graphic chip that comprised several 3D graphic effects. NVIDIA controlled the video card market from 1999 to 2002 with its GeForce family of video cards. During this period, the video memory capacity of cards went from 32 MB in GeForce to 128 MB in GeForce 4. The leadership of NVIDIA was challenged by ATI in 2006 when they launched their Radeon video cards. A video card uses the information sent to it by application software via CPU and then decides how to use the pixels on the screen to make the image. There are four basic components of a video card that are used to generate an image on the monitor:
Choice of a graphic card depends upon your graphic needs. For users who use computer for simple tasks like Web surfing and Word processing, the inbuilt graphic component on the motherboard is sufficient. In case, of users who do a lot of 3D graphic work or those who are enthusiastic about games, a high-end video card would be best. » Download Video Card Drivers |
Industry Awards
    |
downloaddrivers.net