Can any1 tell me what are video cards/3-D accelerators, meant 4 games in pc ?
By jugnujunaid
@jugnujunaid (349)
India
March 9, 2007 9:07am CST
I am preparing for buying a new pc. As we know that level of pc gaming is very high these days & there is a thing called as video card/3-D accelerators, required for games. So, can any 1 tell me more about it ?
3 responses
@serioushacker (121)
• India
9 Mar 07
Yes, they are called graphic cards or video cards. The job they do is that they process all the complex graphics of the new age games. So, while they take the job of graphics processing, your own cpu processor gets itself a reduction in workload. These video cards come in capacities lik 128MB
256MB 512MB. The more the capacity of a graphic card, the more the processing it can do at a particular time. Purchasing a 256MB video card would be just fine if you have 512MB of ram and a good processor. But if you can manage upto 1GB of ram and a video card upto 512MB then you'd become a gaming king. By the way, there are two dominating brands in the market. Nvidia and ATI. Both of them manufacture high quality video cards. Chose from a wide variety of graphic cards from the market. Remeber.
The more the memory, The more the processing power. There are other aspects of graphic cards also, but i'd limit this 'article' upto here only.
TIP:- Along with a nice video card, try to get yourself a nice 'Dual core' processor.
2 people like this
@Taskr36 (13963)
• United States
12 Mar 07
I'm surprised you gave this one best answer. Having a 512MB does not make you a gaming king. In fact, NVidia and ATI have been putting 512MB RAM on their low end cards just to fool people into buying them. The clock speed of the GPU and the speed of the memory is the most critical element. A 6800LE with 512MB is a low end card which can't even utilize the 512MB. My 6800GT 256MB will blow it away in every benchmark. Even the 7600GT and some of the 7900's only have 256MB since most current games don't utilize more than that.
The only time you'll need that kind of memory is when you are running resolutions over 1900 X 1440. Most people don't even have monitors that can support that.
@Taskr36 (13963)
• United States
9 Mar 07
First I'll explain what Graphics/Video cards are and what they do. A graphics card has two important parts, a processor(GPU), and RAM measured in MB. When you are running a 3D game your video card is doing the bulk of the work so your processor and system RAM can run the computer's other functions. On computers without an independent video card the system processor and RAM must do twice the work since they are running the computer and the game at the same time. That is why integrated graphics are poor choices for gaming.
There are two chipset manufacturers for high end video cards. Nvidia and ATI(AMD). If you plan to do any gaming, you should have a card from one of these companies.
Integrated graphics are a poor choice for gaming. However there are decent integrated graphics made by ATI and Nvidia which are adequate, but not great for gaming.
The worst integrated graphics are made by Intel, S3, SIS, and VIA. They are almost completely incapable of playing anything more graphics intensive than solitaire.
If you have any other more specific questions feel free to ask.
2 people like this
@usher8701 (29)
• Philippines
9 Mar 07
u buy an 8800 gtx of video card... expensive but nice in graphic especially in higher graphics games and switch to maximum details...
1 person likes this
