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Video Cards

Video Cards

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 Millennium. 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 for processing the
special video data from the central processing unit (CPU) into a format that the
visual display unit (VDU) or monitor can understand, to form a picture on the
screen....