Graphics cards are important almost as screen (nothing is more important than screen because, it is at the and of chain and can ruin everything). During last decade, graphics cards made tremendous progress when quality comes into question.

Graphics card is acctualy adapter, that is installed on motherboard like swap module. It also can be integrated part on motherboard, which is case in laptops, but there is also relativly big number of desktop computers with integrated graphics card.

Performances of those cards are much weaker then changable module cards, because, after all they use system memory that is much slower then video memory.

Every graphics cards, module or integrated is consisted of 3 components:

Set of video chips, GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) by some manufacture (ATI, nVidia..). Video chips make signal that monitor has to recive so it could format a picture.

Memory can be(EDO, SGRAM, SDRAM, VRAM...), and all these memories are variations of system RAM memories, spcialy optimized for this application. Memory is neccesary, because graphics card must remember all screen image in every moment.

RAMDAC is chip that convets digital/alalog signals.