Video Card

A video card is an expansion card whose function is to generate and show output images to a display device. Many video cards offer added functions, such as accelerated rendering of 3D scenes and 2D graphics, video capture, TV-tuner adapter, MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding, FireWire, light pen, TV output, or the ability to connect multiple monitors (multi-monitor ). Other modern high performance video cards are used for more graphically demanding purposes, such as PC games.Video hardware can be integrated on the motherboard, often occurring with early machines. In this configuration it is sometimes referred to as a video controller or graphics controller.

The first IBM PC video card, which was released with the first IBM PC, was developed by IBM Company in 1981. The MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter) could only work in text mode representing 80 columns and 25 lines (80x25) in the screen. It had a 4KB video memory and just one color.

Starting with the MDA in 1981, several video cards were released, which are summarized in the attached table.

VGA was widely accepted, which led some corporations such as ATI, Cirrus Logic and S3 to work with that video card, improving its resolution and the number of colors it used. This developed into the SVGA (Super VGA) standard, which reached 2 MB of video memory and a resolution of 1024x768 at 256 color mode.

In 1995 the first consumer 2D/3D cards were released, developed by Matrox, Creative, S3, ATI and others. These video cards followed the SVGA standard, but incorporated 3D functions. In 1997, 3dfx released the Voodoo graphics chip, which was more powerful compared to other consumer graphics cards, introducing 3D effects such as mip mapping, Z-buffering and anti-aliasing into the consumer market. After this card, a series of 3D video cards were released, such as Voodoo2 from 3dfx, TNT and TNT2 from NIVIDIA. The bandwidth required by these cards was approaching the limits of the PCI bus capacity. Intel developed the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) which solved the bottleneck between the microprocessor and the video card. From 1999 until 2002, NVIDIA controlled the video card market (taking over 3dfx) with the GeForce family. The improvements carried out at this time were focused in 3D algorithms and graphics processor clock rate. Video memory was also increased to improve their data rate; DDR technology was incorporated, improving the capacity of video memory from 32 MB with GeForce to 128 MB with GeForce 4.

Since 2002, ATI and Nvidia dominated the video card market with their Radeon and (respectively), sharing around 90% of the independent graphics card market forcing other manufacturers into smaller, niche markets.