How to pick the perfect graphics card

In the beginning 
The graphics card market is the fastest moving area of PC hardware but, like every other aspect of the computing industry, it had humble beginnings.

Computers weren’t originally designed to display demanding graphics, so the computing industry was content to let the CPU handle both ordinary computing tasks and graphics processing.

However, the demands of PC users have changed radically since the days of Space Invaders.

The arrival of 3D games and other graphics-intensive applications means CPUs aren’t powerful enough to handle everything.

So it is now standard practice to offload graphics tasks to a dedicated graphics processing unit (GPU), leaving the CPU free for other system tasks.

Most people think of ATI and Nvidia as the leading vendors of graphics cards. In the world of high-performance cards, these rivals are certainly dominant, but it is Intel that is king of the graphics chip market as measured by volume shipments.

This is solely due to the enormous number of graphics processors integrated directly onto motherboards that use Intel chipsets.

These integrated chips will often have no dedicated video memory, but borrow from the main system memory in order to function, which may compromise the rest of your PC’s performance.

Integrated graphics processors have historically offered appalling performance compared to their discrete counterparts, but recent chipset developments have allowed for far quicker integrated solutions, the best of which now include their own dedicated video memory.

Intel’s Extreme Graphics II and ATI’s IGP and IXP solutions are two of the best integrated solutions available at the time of writing.

Both are fully compliant with DirectX 9, the latest iteration of Microsoft’s low-level application programming interface (API) used for creating high-performance multimedia applications.

As a result, they will happily run 3D graphics, even if not at the highest resolutions and detail settings.

While integrated solutions are adequate for casual gamers, more serious players will prefer a discrete graphics card such as those made by ATI or Nvidia.

Both firms have been responsible for dozens of chip models over the years, but neither manufactures its own chips or cards – they are what’s known as fabless semiconductor manufacturers.