VGA cards, display
adapters, drivers.
Every PC computer comes with
a VGA card or display adapter since this is
what sends the display data to the monitor.
Depending on the computer use, you may need a
simple VGA card or one specialized at doing
more precise tasks. Someone using just data
entry or text editors do not have the same
needs as people making 3D drawings using
AutoCad for example.
Computer games software need
a faster and more 3D handling capabilities
from the VGA card. 3D games have lots of
textures to load and have to calculate the
shape of those textures according to your
position within the virtual world you move in
and how it should look. Most VGA cards will
have basic 3D capabilities, but a serious
gamer will look for high-end VGA adapter to
have the best 3D game experience possible.
Nvidia and ATI are some of
the big 3D VGA card manufacturer that offer
many different models for different users.
Some will come with more DRAM (display ram),
TV in and TV out capabilities and even the
possibility to connect 2 monitors to the same
display adapter.
Serious 3D game players will
usually try to have as much dram as possible
to be able to have the smoothest motions while
playing their games. This is because more
textures can be loaded into the VGA adapter
dram and have less standard RAM access to get
those in memory.
 Some will
like to have a TV-in option to be able to
record TV shows. The TV-out will allow to have
the computer display on a TV set and can be
fun to play games on a giant screen. The
display results of your desktop will not be as
good on a TV than on a monitor, because the TV
resolution is not as high. You may have to use
a lower display resolution like 800x600 on
your PC to be able to read it properly on the
TV set. Most VGA cards fit in
the AGP slot of the PC computer but there is
also PCI VGA cards. There is only one AGP slot
on the computer main board and is just for VGA
adapters to give them a straight access to
RAM. PCI VGA cards have to go through the PCI
bus that is shared with the other PCI devices
and will have a much lower performance than an
AGP VGA card. You can have
more than one VGA card in a computer to be
able to have more than one monitor and have a
bigger desktop to work on. You can have an AGP
adapter for full screen 3D drawings and a
slower PCI card to display the drawing
software menus for example. This is very
useful for design and software conception.
VGA adapters are usually Plug&Play, can easily
be replaced and will install the proper
display drivers from the installation CD
supplied with the VGA card. You just have to
remove the actual VGA card in Windows's device
manager, shut down, replace the VGA adapter in
the PC, boot the computer and let Windows
detect the new device. It will install a
default driver ad/or ask for the display
adapter's driver CD to set up the new driver
for the device. |
