Have you ever wondered how video graphic displayed in our computers is processed? If you don’t, then let me resolve some of your wonders. Yeah, I purposedly said some of your wonders because videos graphic involve lots of things and perhaps the thing that we need to know shuldn’t be too details, for the sake of our benefits let us discuss briefly how computer graphics are displayed.

Whether you’re displaying simple text, 2D animation or complex 3D animation in your computer screen, all this graphics need to go through what we called as video card or sometimes it is called as graphic card, graphic accelerator or display adapter. Basically, in processing the graphic that you’re about to display in your computer screen, CPU will picks up the data from the file and sends it to the graphic card’s chip in the tiny slot, to handle the processing and return the desired video to the screen/monitor. All this processing were executed in the fraction of second, it very fast and perhaps faster than a blink of our eyes.

To make it imaginable, all the things that you can see physically is the interconnection between your videos card and your computer screen. Typically, computers include a few small ports that video devices can plug in to. This input basically connect another devices or computer to send the images to the screen. There are few common methods for the output such as Video Graphics Array (VGA), Video In / Video Out (VIVO) and S-Video, High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) and Display port. The arrangement is from the older to the latest. VGA is the early type of video input/output and it might not be seen in today’s machines. VIVO and S-Video is the extensions that support 3D rendering by translating the data. HDMI is the interconnection for digital audio and video and is a bit more robust to support streaming video. The latest technology in the video input/output is the Display Port. It’s said to be capable of putting all other connections to rest and it support streaming video rendering without any distortion.

Now, by knowing a little bit about video card, perhaps we can appreciate the technology behind our fancy graphics that appear accross our monitor.