The Video Card is the fastest-evolving component of the PC. In fact, nVidia and ATI, leaders in the Video Card business, roll out more advanced video cards roughly every six months. If you compare this to CPUs, which evolve very quickly, you would realize the rapid evolution of Video Cards. Ever since the introduction of the third dimension to PCs, the race has been on to produce the fastest Video Card. Slowly, this has changed, and companies are starting to focus on image quality as much as the speed.

nVidia's Geforce3 delivers great performance as well as flawless image quality.
Screenshot taken from the game "Evolva"

Video Cards can be referred to with many different names. They include Video Boards, Graphics Boards, Display Adapters, as well as Video Cards. The names all mean the same thing. On this web site, we will most commonly refer to them as Video Cards.

The Video Card segment of the Display Section will focus on the most important parts of today's video cards. This includes the parts of today's typical Video Card, how the Video Card works in 2D, as well as the two contrasting methods of rendering in 3D. These two methods are called Immediate-Based Rendering, and Tile-Based Rendering.