Parts of Graphics Card

Parts of Graphics Card

Main Graphics Card Manufacturers

There are 2 main rivals

1.     NVidia

2.     ATI

Both brands are working hard to compete each other in the race of graphics technology.

Nvidia has introduced:

1.     GeForce

2.     Quadro

3.     nForce

4.     Tegra

GeForce technology is introduced to make our personal user computer capable of playing graphical enhanced games like doom, FarCry etc.

Quadro technology is introduced to make workstations capable to run CAD (Computer Aided Designs) and also DCC (Digital Content Creation)

nForce technology is introduced to make motherboards capable of playing games. Chip-set of nForce is placed on motherboard to facilitate general user with economic pack.

Tegra technology is introduced for mobile graphics.

Similarly ATI has divisions of technology. Like

1.     Mach Series

2.     Rage Series

3.     Radeon Series

Mach Series were introduced when GUI 2D was first time presented in Windows.

Rage Series - 3D graphics enhancement were introduced after Mach Series.

Radeon Series - it was introduced in yeah 2000 for the better graphical performance.

Nowadays every computer is provided with Graphic Cards. Before buying any graphics card following things should be observed. Memory should be enough, GPU should be enough fast to run heavy games, should meet the latest technology. In my next post I'll explain which things we need to know before buying graphics card.

2D, or two dimensional graphics are the kind of graphics displayed when you use a web browser, check email or work on a spreadsheet. For 2D graphics the major factors are resolution and refresh rate. 

Resolution determines how many little dots are used to draw the image on the screen.
3D or three dimensional graphics are what all first-person-shooter type games use. The value of a good 3D graphics card is that it offloads most of this work from the computer's main processor and a specialized processor on the graphics card handles these calculations. This allows for faster, slicker looking graphics. Also, newer 3D cards handle all kinds of additional functions that gives surfaces texture, make water transparent, etc

How do you measure the speed of a graphics card?

Measuring the speed of the graphics card is a lot more difficult than with the CPU or RAM or even the hard disk. There are many factors which affect how quickly the graphics card can do its job. Many of these only come into play when the graphics card is undertaking certain tasks.

Core clock speed - Much the same as the way you measure the speed of a CPU. The core speed of the Graphics card is measured in MHz and represents the amount of clock cycles the graphics process can do per second. This is a good but not definitive way of telling how fast the graphics card is.

Memory clock speed - Exactly the same of as the core clock speed, except of course that it is for the memory of the graphics card and not the core. This is just as important as the core speed as the memory contains textures that need to be applied to the pixels.

Pixel Pipelines - The amount of pixel pipelines a graphics card has can have a great impact on the speed of the image rendering. This is all about pixel pushing power. A card with 8 pipelines can process twice as many pixels as a card of the same core speed and 4 pipelines.

Textures per pipeline - This only come into effect when multiple textures are needed on the one pixel. Simply put if a multiple texture is needed, then a graphics card with more textures per pipeline will be quicker. On single textured pixels the amount of textures per pipeline will have no effect.

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