The Graphic Accelerator Guide

Basics And 2D Considerations

The video card, which is inevitable in each computer system, is responsible to process the special video data received from the CPU into a format that a monitor can understand to make a rastered picture on the screen out of it. More or less the monitor screen is still THE output device of a computer system, it's the most important port through which we humans get data transferred from the computer. Therefore the Video Card/Monitor-Combo is one of the most important parts of our computer and we should take very good care of it.

Now what do we have to ask of this Video Card/Monitor Combo ?

Picture Quality is very important, so that it's not gonna be a pain for our eyes to sit and look at the screen. Here are the factors for picture quality:

• Sharpness
• Brightness
• Stability
• Colour Resolution
• Screen resolution

Speed of the video device . Due to the work we do with the computer, the picture changes eversooften and these changes should take place as fast as possible. It depends on what in particular we do on the computer, so there are also some catagories:

• 2D performance , also called GUI or Windows performance , due to Windows being the most popular GUI OS. This used to be the most inportant performance so far, it determines how fast your office applications perform, e.g. how fast you can scroll text/graphics or how fast you can open and close new windows. Since the days of the Matrox Millennium 2D performance of graphic cards got pretty close to the limit and nowadays the latest graphic cards don't differ much in 2D performance anymore, most of them are pretty fast, faster than the old standard of the Matrox Millennium.
• 3D performance is the most important topic to distinguish between different graphic cards today. Cards without 3D acceleration will soon disappear from the market and Matrox had to learn this the hard way when releasing the Millennium II with hardly any 3D features. They lost their market leader position in an instance. S3 used to be a big player in the graphic chip market, but the mediocre 3D performance of their chip got them almost completely out of business. Similar things seem to happen to Cirrus Logic and others.
• DOS performance , which nowadays is to be equalized with game performance for DOS based games for all professional applications today are running under a graphical user interface operating system. DOS based games are disappearing as well, so that this performance is getting less and less important.
• Video Display performance in my eyes is still not that important to most of us, but whoever likes to watch and process videos on his computer will have to look for a fast video processing card. DVD will probably bring a significant change here.