The display adapter shown above is one of the mid-range products currently available and has a price tag somewhere between £100 and £160. These high-end display adapters have a tendency to be bulky, consume a lot of power, and require their own cooling system.Īn Asus ATI EAH5750 FORMULA PCI-E display adapter This will invariably be an add-on card with its own graphical processing unit (GPU), and anything up to four gigabytes of dedicated memory. In order to run state-of-the-art computer games and other computationally intensive graphical applications such as flight simulators and virtual medical training environments, a powerful graphics adapter is required. The number of calculations that must be performed when rendering 3D scenes for many computer games would severely tax the capabilities of the computer's main processor.
If a colour depth of 32 bits per pixel is required, the amount of memory required to store a single screen of information (referred to as a frame) is 786,432 x 32 = 25,165,824 bits of data, or 3 megabytes. Even a relatively modest screen resolution (by today's standards) of 1024 x 768 pixels gives a total of 786,432 pixels. Other important drivers include the almost universal adoption of the graphical user interface (GUI), a phenomenal growth in the number of multimedia applications, and the popularity of Internet streaming media.ĭisplaying high resolution images and millions of colours demands a considerable amount of both processing power and computer memory, due to the enormous amount of information that must be processed. Indeed, it is probably the computer gaming industry that has been the main driver behind the development of high-performance display adapter technology. Even relatively modest display adapters can now handle computer animations, video playback, and 3D interactive games. They are capable of operating at very high resolutions and displaying millions of colours.
Modern display adapters can take the form of a separate card or may be integrated into the motherboard. It used the Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) standard introduced by IBM in 1981, and was only capable of displaying text at a screen resolution of 720 x 350 pixels. In the first IBM personal computers the display adapter took the form of an expansion card that was mounted in one of the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) slots on the system motherboard. The display adapter in a computer system (often called a graphics card) is the hardware responsible for generating the images that appear on the system's visual display unit.
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