Having a terrific graphics card isn’t all about blasting aliens to kingdom come. A fast 3-D video card can speed up the display of digital video and even Windows XP itself. In this section, I clue you in on what to look for when considering a video card upgrade.

Pray, what slot do you need?

Although today’s video cards look like any other typical adapter cards, they actually fit in either of two types of motherboard slots:

-  Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP): The fastest video cards for today’s Athlon and Pentium 4 computers use a dedicated AGP slot; no other adapter cards will fit into this slot. (Refer to your motherboard or PC manual to make sure that you have an AGP slot before you buy an AGP video card.) AGP video cards provide the best performance, but they’re usually a bit more expensive than their Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) counterparts.

-  PCI: These video cards fit into a standard PCI card slot, so they work with just about any PC motherboard currently available. However, you’ll encounter a performance hit when you use a PCI video card; if your motherboard has an AGP slot available, I strongly recommend that you use an AGP video card instead. Rate the performance of a particular card while you’re shopping by checking on the box or the manufacturer’s Web site for benchmark results that you can use to compare with other cards. Try the popular benchmark program 3DMark 2001 SE ($40, from www.futuremark.com). You can also run Quake III or Unreal Tournament 2003 and compare the maximum framesper- second that the card can display (the higher the frame rate, the better). You can also find up-to-date reviews of the latest cards and video chipsets at Tom’s Hardware on the Web at www.tomshardware.com. Exploring the differences between chipsets Short trip. There really aren’t any differences between chipsets, which are the separate Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) “brain” that powers today’s top 3-D video cards. Allow me to explain. The two major players in the PC video card chipset battle are

-  NVIDIA: The cutting-edge crew at NVIDIA (www.nvidia.com) has produced some of the fastest video cards for the PC in recent years, including the classics RIVA TNT and TNT2 as well as the GeForce/GeForce2/GeForce3 series. The latest NVIDIA chipset, the NVIDIA GeForce4, is just plain awesome. In fact, very few games or 3-D applications on today’s software market can actually push a GeForce4 card to its limit. (I know because I have a GeForce4 TI4200.)

-  ATI: ATI Technologies (www.ati.com) has been producing popular video chipsets for a decade now, including its Rage line. Typically, ATI video cards are somewhat cheaper than NVIDIA cards, and many motherboard manufacturers build ATI video hardware directly onto their products. Lately, ATI’s new Radeon 9700-series chipset has been a big winner with performance that even tops the latest GeForce4 cards. And here’s the payoff the latest offerings from either of these companies will deliver more performance than PC gamers are likely to need for at least a year. In fact, I’ve been told recently by my friends at NVIDIA that they’re appealing directly to the PC game development community, attempting to help develop games that actually use all the hardware power featured on the cards. (Ah, for once . . . hardware that doesn’t suddenly turn outdated in six months. Awesome.)

Other video card features that you’ll want

Naturally, you can evaluate more than just chipsets and connectors when comparing video cards. Keep an eye out for these features and specifications while you shop.

Onboard random access memory (RAM): Like your motherboard, your video card carries its own supply of memory. Today’s cards typically include anywhere from 32–128MB of memory. Again, the general rule is to buy a card with as much onboard RAM as possible. More RAM equals higher resolutions with more colors on-screen.

Driver and standards support: Any PC video card should fully support the Microsoft DirectX video standards currently at DirectX 9.0. Gamers will also appreciate robust OpenGL support (an open video standard that’s becoming very popular in 3-D action games). Support for these standards should be listed on the box.

Maximum resolution: The higher the resolution that a card can produce, the more that your monitor can display at once and not just in games, but documents, digital photographs, and your Windows desktop. For example, I like to write manuscripts at a resolution of 1152 x 864 instead of 1024 x 768 because I can see more of the page in Microsoft Word without scrolling. Today’s cards can reach truly epic resolutions, such as 2048 x 1536; personally, however, I don’t work at such stratospheric resolutions often because a few hours of work usually leaves me with eyestrain (and possibly a headache as well). The maximum resolution that you can display on your system is also dependent upon the monitor that you’re using. Therefore, if you upgrade to the latest video card but you’re still using an old clunker of a monitor with a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768, you’re stuck there. (Time to invest in a new display.)

Video capture and TV output: A card with these features can create digital video footage from an analog TV signal (that’s the video capture part) and transfer the image that you see on your monitor to a TV, VCR, or camcorder (that’s the TV output part). If you need to produce a VHS tape with images from your PC, or if you want to create video CDs or DVDs from your home movies on VHS tape, spend a little extra on a video capture/TV output card. For example, the ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 has both of these features built in.

TV tuner: A card with a built-in TV tuner can actually turn your PC into a TV set, including the ability to pause and replay programs on the fly (like how a TiVo unit works with a regular TV). You can use a traditional antenna or connect the card to your cable or satellite system. Just don’t let your boss know that the new video card that the company bought gives you the ability to watch your favorite soaps in a window on your desktop . . . you’re supposed to be working.

Multiple monitor support: Many of today’s video cards allow you to connect two monitors to one card. You can either choose to see two separate desktops, or you can opt to make the two monitors into a seamless desktop. Imagine the size of your Windows workspace when it’s spread across two displays!

MPEG hardware support: Finally, I come to digital video which, as you can read about in earlier articles, is typically stored in either MPEG, AVI, or MOV formats, with the most popular being the MPEG format. Without the compression that these video formats offer (which shrinks the digital video file in size), you’d never get a full-length movie on a single DVD. Although your PC can use software to encode (create a compressed MPEG file) and decode (read a compressed MPEG file) MPEG files on your hard drive or a DVD, a video card with built-in encoding and decoding features can really speed up the process. This hardware support is particularly valuable if you’re going to do serious video editing on your PC because you’ll cut down the amount of time required to save your movies to your hard drive.