On 15 Jan 99, at 15:40, Ira Wallin wrote:

> If a major manufacturer is ncluding a video card with the PC --
> should I be concerened about the brand name?


  It's unlikely to be anything really fancy.  But unlike integrated
video, if you decide to replace it you can take the old one out and
sell/give it to someone else or put it in another machine.

> Also what does it mean when the ad says it's a "video accelerator"?

  Briefly, this means that the card itself has a CPU on it.

  Suppose an application wants to fill a ractangular area on the screen
with some particular colour.  Without an accelerator, the main CPU must
set the colour of each pixel in that area individually.
  With an accelerator, the main CPU just passes to the video card the
top, bottom, left and right coordinates of the area, the colour to use,
and a code that means "fill".  The accelerator CPU takes care of
stuffing the colour value into each pixel, while the main CPU moves on
to something else.


David G

                Curious about the people moderating your
                   messages? Visit our staff web site:
                     http://nospin.com/pc/staff.html