What is a 3D accelerated video card?

The most simple kind of display device is a dumb frame buffer. Basically you have a memory region where the program writes to it and it changes whats displayed on the screen.



Most graphics cards are a lot more advanced than that. Most have what is called a Graphics Processing Unit or GPU. It's like a CPU, but it's desined to process graphics. Basically directX knows how to offload most of the graphics stuff that your hardware supports. A CPU like pentium 4 is a general purpose processor. A GPU, like an NVIDIA chip, are application specific intergrated circuits. To do the same stuff in software that a GPU can do in hardware would take a lot more clock cycles, so it's really efficient at doing it's job.



The simple answer is that most graphics cards sold today are 3d accelerated.|||these are rather old now, what u would do is have a extra card in the pc, that would act as a 2nd graphics card taking the power of your 1st and adding more 3d power to it

and on the back of your machine would be a loop cable between the 2 card and u would plug that monitor into the 2nd graphics card.

there is a lot of new machines will 2 graphics cards, but the system is very different from the old days, it will either be SLI or crossfire|||Video cards which process 3 Dimension images quicker than a regular video card. Most video cards are like this, the new ones atleast.|||It's a card used to speed up graphics-intensive games and 3d applications. New computers incorporate a weak 3d card into their motherboard, but you can install a better one if you want more power for 3d graphics. These cards make a huge difference in terms of application speed for demanding programs.|||It's a video card with the independent processing power and memory to accurately map and model 3- dimensional objects and retain them for the next change coming 1/20 to 1/1000 of a second later. The 3dfx's Voodoo line was innovative and dominated awhile, but its nemesis, Nvidia, conquered and absorbed it. Nvidia's GeForce and ATI's Radeon are now the most popular competitors for graphics complexity and speed. Their highest models can each run multiple hi-res screens at near infinite color depth and refreshes too quick for any eye to follow. Most of us lowly humans can get by with much less expensive cards from earlier generations.