Video

• Video being displayed on a computer takes CPU and RAM. The more intricate the video processing, the more resources it needs to display correctly. Video can often slow down a computer to a crawl.
  
  

The Purpose of a Video Card

• Video cards take the load off of the CPU and RAM, which smooths out video. They also enable more advanced video applications to run efficiently without any performance hits to the rest of the computer.
  
  

How a Video Card Works

• A video card has a graphics processing unit (GPU) and onboard memory. The GPU takes the load of the CPU while the memory is utilized in place of the RAM.
  
  

Connection Types

• Video cards are installed directly onto a motherboard in three different ways. The most basic setup was the PCI slot, which was a generic slot that fit other add-on cards as well. AGP was developed as a graphics specific slot and offered better performance than PCI. PCI-Express is the most efficient of the input types.
  
  

Laptops

• Graphics cards can also be found on laptops. A notebook cannot have a video card added onto it. There are two types of graphics cards found on notebooks. There is the shared video processor which shares memory with the computer and dedicated which has its own memory built in. A dedicated video card offers better mobile graphics performance.