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What is a Graphics Card?
A graphics card is an element of computer hardware designed to enhance its display capabilities, particularly for gaming and video. In practical terms, it adds capacity to a device’s video memory, allowing it to render animations, images, and videos in high-definition (HD).
The quality of the display on a computer monitor is determined in large part by the quality of the graphics card. The brain of a graphics card is called the graphics processing Unit? (GPU). A graphics card is technically an optional add-on that users can install in the machine’s expansion slot. There are many different makes and models of graphics cards designed for different kinds of video-intensive applications.
Key Takeaways
- Graphic cards give computers extra memory and processing power to handle visually rich gaming and video.
- There are two kinds of graphics cards: integrated and discrete.
- Discrete graphics cards are add-ons that connect to a computer’s expansion slot.
- They are sometimes confused with video cards, which control a computer’s monitor.
- Originally created for gamers, today, modern graphic cards can enhance the capabilities of a wide range of applications.
How Graphics Cards Work
When you start a video or gaming application, your computer’s primary chip, the central processing unit (CPU), sends image information to the graphics card in the form of binary data. The graphics card then converts that information into tiny squares of color called pixels that make up the images on a computer display. The more densely packed with pixels an image is, the higher its definition. That’s why a high-definition image has double the pixels of a standard-definition (SD) image.
In videos, each frame is a separate image with its own collection of pixels – all of which have to be rendered rapidly and in sequence by the graphics card.
The speed which a sequence of video images unfolds is called the frame rate. The higher the frame rate, the higher the number of individual images that need to be displayed within a one-second timescale.
If a computer can’t process images at the correct frame rate, the images won’t display properly, and the viewing and/or playing experience will be poor. Web3 developers creating new online games need to consider graphics card capabilities.
What Does a Graphics Card Do?
The graphics card enables a computer to render on-screen videos and animations smoothly. It adds power to a computer’s basic graphics processing capabilities, allowing users to enjoy a high-quality visual experience when they play games, watch streaming services and videos, or use video-editing applications.
The graphics card operates in conjunction with the computer’s main chip, the central processing unit or CPU, to process and display rich visual data.
Difference Between a Graphics Card and a Video Card
- Dedicated circuit board that contains a chip and additional memory called VRAM
- It controls how the images you see on a monitor are rendered and the frame rate a computer can accommodate
- A hardware component designed to enhance the display quality of a computer monitor
- It controls display elements like resolution, colors, and speed of display according to the specs and limitations of the monitor itself
Types of Graphics Cards
There are two main types of graphics cards:
- Integrated graphics cards: These are pre-installed onto a computer’s motherboard. Most integrated graphics cards lack the processing power to handle graphics-heavy computational tasks.
- Discrete graphics cards: These are external graphics cards added to a motherboard as an additional component.
Components of Graphics Cards
Features of a Graphics Card
Graphics cards enable users to reduce the rendering time of an image in high-definition computing applications.
Connecting a graphics card to a computer display requires a port, which is present on both the monitor and graphics card.
Many of today’s graphics cards now feature support for connecting two monitors to a single card, which is useful for gaming, video editing, and some financial trading applications.
Each graphics card has its own dedicated memory for video and image rendering tasks, typically from 128MB to 2GB in size.
Graphics Cards Pros and Cons
- In large-scale networked environments like data centers and intensive applications like supercomputing, the GPUs in graphics cards deliver higher per-watt efficiency than traditional CPUs
- Having multiple GPUs installed can provide added parallel processing power when a computationally demanding application needs more from the chip
- Can handle a wide range of computational duties without the need for more custom hardware or specialized processors
- They have less powerful cores than a CPU, which means they aren’t ideal for single-threaded tasks
- GPU memory is usually smaller than the standard RAM used for other computer tasks, making it unsuitable for tasks that require more memory
- Writing code to utilize GPU capabilities often requires knowledge of specialized programming languages and frameworks
The Bottom Line
By definition, graphics cards give computers the capability to render the richly detailed graphics that today’s gaming and video applications provide.
Choosing between mid-range vs. high-end graphics cards depends on the demands of the application it will be used for. Though originally designed to improve the gaming experience, graphics cards can also deliver powerful computing capabilities for professional design platforms, data analytics tools, and many other applications that require rich visuals to be displayed quickly in crisp, high-definition detail.
