What is Graphics Card in Computer and How It's Work

Graphics Card

Graphics Card are the piece of computer hardware which produces the image you see on your monitor. The Graphics Card is responsible for rendering an image to your monitor, and it does this by converting data into a signal your monitor can understand. The better your graphics card the better and smoother an image can be produced. This is naturally very important for gamers and video editors.

A graphics card provides high-quality visual display by processing and executing graphical data using advanced graphical techniques, features and functions. A graphics card is also known as a graphics adapter, graphics controller, graphics accelerator card or graphics board.

It includes a dedicated graphical processing unit (GPU) and a dedicated RAM that help it to process graphical data quickly. Like most processors, a graphics card also has a dedicated heat sink to keep the heat out of the GPU. A graphics card enables the display of 3-D images, image rasterization, higher pixel ration, a broader range of colors and more. Moreover, a graphics card includes various expansion ports such as AGP, HDMI, TV and multiple monitor connectivity.

How Graphics Card Work

• Whatever images you see on your computer monitor are made of tiny dots called pixels. At most common resolution settings, a screen displays more than 2 million pixels, and the computer has to decide what to do with each one in order to create an image. To do this, it needs a translator -- something to take binary data from the CPU and turn it into a picture you can see. This translator is known as a graphics processor, or GPU.

• Ever since 3dfx debuted the original Voodoo accelerator, no single piece of equipment in a PC has had as much of an impact on whether your machine could game as the humble graphics card. While other components absolutely matter, a top-end PC with 32GB of RAM, a $4,000 CPU, and PCIe-based storage will choke and die if asked to run modern AAA titles on a ten-year-old card at modern resolutions and detail levels. Graphics cards, aka GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are critical to game performance and we cover them extensively. But we don’t often dive into what makes a GPU tick and how the cards function.

• Think of a computer as a company with its own art department. When people in the company want a piece of artwork, they send a request to the art department. The art department decides how to create the image and then puts it on paper. The end result is that someone’s idea becomes an actual, viewable picture.

• Graphics card is a motherboard, a graphics card is a printed circuit board that houses a processor and RAM. It also has an input/output system (BIOS) chip, which stores the card’s settings and performs diagnostics on the memory, input and output at startup. A graphics card’s processor, called a graphics processing unit (GPU), is similar to a computer’s CPU. A GPU, however, is designed specifically for performing the complex mathematical and geometric calculations that are necessary for graphics rendering. Some of the fastest GPUs have more transistors than the average CPU. A GPU produces a lot of heat, so it is usually located under a heat sink or a fan.

• In now a days of 3D gaming, many titles like Half-Life and Quake II featured a software renderer to allow players without 3D accelerators to play the title. But the reason we dropped this option from modern titles is simple: CPUs are designed to be general-purpose microprocessors, which is another way of saying they lack the specialized hardware and capabilities that GPUs offer. A modern CPU could easily handle titles that tended to stutter when running in software 18 years ago, but no CPU on Earth could easily handle a modern AAA game from today if run in that mode. Not, at least, without some drastic changes to the scene, resolution, and various visual effects.

• It creating an image out of binary data is a demanding process. To make a 3-D image, the graphics card first creates a wire frame out of straight lines. Then, it rasterizes the image (fills in the remaining pixels). It also adds lighting, texture and color. For fast-paced games, the computer has to go through this process about 60 to 120 times per second. Without a graphics card to perform the necessary calculations, the workload would be too much for the computer to handle.