Also known as Display Adapters or Video Adapters. Their have been two trends in Video Cards these days, with the high end Video Cards getting increasing more powerful and versatile, and The low end cards becoming simpler and more integrated. What type of Video Card you need depends on what type of applications you will be using your computer for. If you need your computer for basic home use with not too many 3D games or Multimedia applications called for, then a good moderately priced Video Adapter should more than suit your needs. As a matter of fact the ones built into your Motherboard can often offer you significant performance advantages. If you are a serious Gamer however, or want to use serious graphics applications, then you should look towards a higher end Video card. The next section will describe what to look for when buying a video card.

An abbreviation for Super VGA, this is the format that all Video Cards use today. SVGA boards can display at least 800 pixels horizontally and 600 vertically and up to 1600 horizontally and 1200 vertically with 16,256, 32,767, or 16,777,216 colors displayed simultaneously. If your video card is a current model than it will assuredly be of SVGA type.

The AGP (Advanced Graphics Port) slot was created specifically for graphics use and is a specification that enhances and accelerates the display of 3D objects. Just about all Video Cards sold today are of the AGP variety. There is no reason why if you are buying a Video Card today that it should not be an AGP card. They are significantly faster and only minimally (if that) more expensive. There are different generations of AGP slots available today. The original AGP was 1X and now there are 2X and 4X AGP slots that allow you to view video at much higher "splatter" (a technical term used to describe how many bad dudes can have their brains blown out at once) rates.

For most people, an AGP video card with 8 MB of RAM is more than enough to run most common applications available today. This should give you a 2D color depth (number of colors) of 16.7 million colors at 85Hz when running at practically any resolution (highest would normally be 1600x1200). At a resolution of 1024x768 your 3D color depth should be at least 64K.

If you are intending to use your machine to work on graphics or play full-screen action games, then you should get 16 MB or consider 32 MB of RAM on your video card to ensure that your graphics are rendered quickly without any significant delay. Todays highest performance video cards have 64MB of DDR SDRAM installed.. In addition, there are special chips and caches on most modern video cards to handle things like 3D rendering, texture mapping, and other specialized requirements of current software. Many of the better cards offer special features on them now including the ability to capture video on your computer (a video or audio/video input port - usually RCA video yellow plug or SVHS port) or the ability to send output from your computer to a television through an RCA or SVHS port. The most common and attractive use of this feature is to use your computer to watch DVD-ROMs and send the video and audio signal to your entertainment system (television and stereo).