Do you mean 3D graphic accelerators?  I think they're great.  They're
pretty much essential for playing most of the latest games arriving on the
market today.  I can't get technical about it but essentially they use
specific hardware encoded features to quickly calculate the visuals in
video games (or any other type of visual application that utilizes hardware
acceleration).

Graphic card types tend to be categorized by the primary chip (or recently
Graphics Processing Unit).  Different manufactures often make cards using
the same chip with very similar performance characteristics.  Typically the
only difference will be additional features added to the card (such as TV Out).

The "best" of course is always debatable and specific to what you want to
do and how much you want to spend.  If you really want the best consumer
grade card wait a few weeks or a month for the cards based on the NVidia
GeForce3 to arrive on the market.  One of these will certainly hold you for
some time to come.  If you can't spend the ridiculous $600 asking price for
one of these (join the club) your next best bet would be either the NVidia
Geforce 2 or ATI's Radeon.  These (I think) are running around $300 a pop
which IMHO is still a bit pricey but doable if you've just gotta have top
notch 3D performance.  You can certainly get acceptable performance,
however, for significantly less money.  As a starting off point here's a
link to the sharkyextreme video reviews.  It may be a bit overwhelming but
they are organized by chip type, which is a nice way to look at the market
choices, and you can get some names of card manufacturers allowing you to
do some further research.

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/hardware_video.shtml

Browse around there's no shortage of information on this subject on the
Internet.

Hope this helped,

Bill Nussbaumer


At 10:24 AM 3/19/01 -0800, you wrote:
>PCBuilders,
>
>What do you think about  accelerators? do they do,
>what they offer to do?
>and which one of the is the best?
>
>Thanks
>Stephen
>
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