A video card is also known as graphics accelerator card, display adapter or graphic card. The images we see on display are produced by this graphic card only. Some Graphic cards usually have various added functions, a few of these are video capture, TV tuner adapter, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoding, FireWire, light pen, TV output and too have a multiple monitor connection capability.

Video cards have been used in devices such as IBM Pcs, Commodore Amiga (connected by the slots Zorro II and Zorro III), Apple II, Apple Macintosh, Atari Mega ST/TT (attached to the Mega Bus or VME interface), Spectravideo SVI-328, MSX, and almost in all video game consoles.

The first video card, MDA(Monochrome Display Adapter) was developed by IBM in 1981, with their first IBM PC. This first video card was featured with 4KB video memory and with one color. After MDA many other cards were released some of them are MDA(4KB), CGA(16KB), HGC(64KB), PGA(320KB), EGA(256KB), 8514, MCGA, VGA(256KB), SVGA(512KB), XGA(1MB), XGA-2(2MB).

All components of the modern video card are fixed on a printed circuit board. This includes:

• Graphic processing unit-GPU is a dedicated processor mainly designed to perform floating point calculations which are fundamental to 3-D graphics rendering.

• Video BIOS-A video BIOS or Firmware is the fundamental program which manages the video card’s operation and provide instructions which allows computer and software to maintain link with card.

• Video memory-Video memory is being accessed by GPU and the display circuitry hence it require specific high speed or multi-port memory, such as VRAM, WRAM, SGRAM, etc.

• RAMDAC-Random Access Memory Digital-to-Analog Converter has a main function to converts all digital signals to analog signals, used by computer displays, which are used by CRT displays. All latest LCDs, plasma displays and TVs directly require digital signals so they do not require RAMDAC.

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