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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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Your choice of graphics processor is your single most important decision

in buying a video card. Low-end graphics processors usually work fine for

the run-of-the-mill user who wants to write letters or run a Web browser.

High-end graphics processors are designed to support the beautiful 3-D

games that are so popular today, and they provide excellent video playback

for high-definition video. We’ll look at 3-D issues a little later in this chapter.

Video Memory

Video memory is crucial to the operation of a PC. It is probably the hardestworking

set of electronics on the PC. Video RAM constantly updates to

reflect every change that takes place on the screen. When you’re working

with heavy-duty applications (such as games), video memory can prove to be

a serious bottleneck in three ways: data throughput speed, access speed, and

simple capacity.

Manufacturers have overcome these bottlenecks by upping the width of

the bus between the video RAM and video processor; using specialized,

super-fast RAM; and adding more and more total RAM.

First, manufacturers reorganized the video display memory on cards to use

a wider bus, giving them more memory bandwidth. Because the system bus is

limited to 32 or 64 bits, this would not be of much benefit if video display

cards weren’t really coprocessor boards. Most of the graphics rendering and

processing is handled on the card by the video processor chip rather than by

the CPU. The main system simply provides the input data to the processor on

the video card. Because the memory bus on the video card can be many times

wider than the standard 64-bit pathway, data can be manipulated and then

sent to the monitor much more quickly (see Figure 17-38).

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