Graphics Cards

A video card is an internal component that connects your motherboard to your monitor. It is usually plugged into your motherboard, and has a connector at the rear of your computer to plug in your monitor. Sometimes the videocard is built-into the motherboard, but it serves the same purpose. A videocard with high memory will improve the speed of your computer, as it will be able to show images on screen faster than a slower one - meaning that the computers CPU can concentrate on other things. If you have a videocard with 64MB RAM (memory) for instance, it will run AVI movies pretty well full-screen. A videocard with only 16MB will be very 'sticky' and might not play the film at all. You need some form of videocard in your computer or you won't see anything on the screen.
A video card is a circuit board with connections for a monitor on it. It gets inserted into one of the expansion slots in the computer motherboard. When it is inserted correctly, the end with the monitor jack will be sticking out the back of the computer. Video cards are typically used for better graphics. Answer: Video Cards, also known as display cards, graphics cards, graphics controllers, or graphics accelerator cards, convert binary data (bytes) into display images. The Video Card is part of the usual complement of computer hardware. The Video Card is external to the motherboard; that is, it is a separate hardware that is attached to the motherboard through the appropriateslot
The simple answer is: it renders graphics on your computer from window animations to video games.

Complex answer:

Your computer already has these capabilities without a dedicated video card. because all computers have one integrated into their CPUs(central processing unit). Intel i series such as i3, i5, i7 processors have pretty good GPUs(graphics processing unit, aka video card). Some are worse. but all computers have them. the integrated gpu's are not too good for hard gaming or video encoding, so it's recommended to buy a dedicated video card.

you connect your crt display or monitor to the video card on your computer

A video card is a computer chip you usually insert into your computer via a AGP slot inside of your computer (usually the same thing a sound card is in) the purpose of which to process images. if a computer does not have a video card the computer has to split the processing power between everything. but with a video card, the card processes the video instead of the computer, so you have better performance and better graphics on pretty much anything.
take the workload of processing "video" away from the main processor so it doesnt slow it up - the video card is a separate computer with its own processor, memory and often cooling fans which is why they tend to be expensive and use a lot of power
Video cards (also called Graphics cards) are used to display images from the computer to a monitor.Without a video card you would have no way of connecting a monitor to a computer unless the motherboard had a built in graphics chip.The more video ram a card has and the faster it is the better it will work,making video intensive programs such as games run faster and look better.A good video card will also make video editing & playback programs run smoother and work faster.
A graphics card is the component in your computer that handles generating the signals that are sent to the monitor or "graphics". It is responsible for generating all the text and pictures that are displayed on your screen. It is called a "card" because most PCs will have a physical card that is inserted in a PCI slot on the motherboard. Some motherboards have built-in graphics cards with is something of a misnomer since it is built in as part of the motherboard and no longer a separate "card".

2D, or two dimensional graphics are the kind of graphics displayed when you use a web browser, check email or work on a spreadsheet. For 2D graphics the major factors are resolution and refresh rate.

Resolution determines how many little dots are used to draw the image on the screen. For example, 640x480 means that the whole screen is drawn using 307,200 little dots in 640 columns and 480 rows. The more dots that are used, the finer the detail. Thus, higher resolutions provide for great detail and image quality.

Another factor is color depth. You may see it expressed as a third parameter such as 640x480x256. This means 640 columns x 480 rows x 256 colors. Color depth is usually a number that is 2 raised to the power of a multiple of 8 up to 32. i.e. 2^8, 2^16, 2^24 or 2^32... or 256, 65,536, 16M or 4G colors. Obviously, the more colors the great the detail again.

Finally refresh refers to how many times a second the image on the screen is redrawn. 60Hz means that the image on the screen is drawn 60 times every second. This becomes important in fast moving video games where the action needs to look really. Also, for CRT type monitors refresh rates of 60Hz and less tend to have a noticeable flicker even on stationary images. This flicker can lead to headaches for many people. Higher refresh rates are better. Of course, having a graphics card with the higher possible resolution and refresh rate doesn't do much good if your monitor doesn't also support this capabilities.

3D or three dimensional graphics are what all first-person-shooter type games use. Of course, current monitor technology still only really displays a 2D image, but the player is immersed in a landscape where they can moved their characters head and see objects in all directions and move around within this world. This type of display capabilities requires some pretty intense mathematical calculation to be done very fast. The value of a good 3D graphics card is that it offloads most of this work from the computer's main processor and a specialized processor on the graphics card handles these calculations. This allows for faster, slicker looking graphics. Also, newer 3D cards handle all kinds of additional functions that gives surfaces texture, make water transparent, etc.

Any video card that supports DirectX 9c.

Nvidia cards have gone through 10 series since shader model 3.0 has been supported. This means that we now have new models starting in 6, but if you go back to the older models past 500, 100, 9000, to the old 6000 series, these cards support Shader model 3.0.

One of the first ATI cards to support directX 9c and shader model 3.0 was the x1600, now we are on the Mobility 7000 series.

All video cards made within the past 6 years should support it.