Video card

Essay by Kamson KamHigh School, 12th gradeA, January 1996

download word file, 11 pages 4.8

Introduction

People are living in a three-dimensional space. They know what is up, down, left, right, close and far. They know when something is getting closer or moving away. However, the traditional personal computers can only make use of two dimensional space due to relatively low technology level of the video card in the past. As the new technology has been introduced to the video card industry in recent years, the video card can now render 3D graphics. Most of the PC computer games nowadays are in three dimensions. In addition, some web sites also apply the use of three dimensional space. This means that they are no longer a flat homepage, but instead a virtual world. With that added dimension, they all look more realistic and attractive. Nevertheless, 3D do not exist in most of the business programs today, but it can be forecasted that it is not far away.

Many new kinds of video cards have been introduced to the market recently. In the past, the video card could only deliver two dimensional graphics which were only in low resolution. However, there has now emerged as a result of high resolution three dimensional graphics technology. This paper will discuss why the video card nowadays can process high resolution three dimensional graphics, but why the video card in the past could only process low resolution two dimensional graphics. The explanation will be based on some recently developed video cards such like Matrox Millenium. This paper will also discuss how the 3D graphic displays on a 2D monitor. Lastly, the video card, Matrox Millennium, will also be discussed.

Basic principles

In order to understand the recent development of the video card, let's take a look on how a video card works.

The video card is a circuit, which is responsible...