Upgrade your graphics card, see the difference

Vishnu K. Mahmud, Contributor, Jakarta

Friends and relatives sometimes ask me how they could improve their computer's graphic capabilities. I always ask them, "What do you plan to do with it? Do you intend to create and edit a short movie? Design a house or tall building? Compile animation? Play the latest 3-D computer game? Or, watch VCDs?"

All the tasks mentioned above require powerful video graphic adapters, the device that connects the motherboard to the monitor. Back in the mid-1980s, a video adapter simply outputted limited graphics onto a monochrome monitor, usually in green letters on a black background (remember the film War Games?).

Today, they are expected to relay movies, display the latest 3-D special effects and run high-powered video games.

If you read a computer or PC games journal nowadays, you'll see a lot of names like Riva TNT, GeForce or ATI Rage Pro. These are the names of the various types of video cards that are available on the market today. No longer dubbed video graphic adapters, these new 3-D Accelerators are the main requirements for playing new video games.

Do you really need the latest technology for surfing the Net and typing a few documents? Maybe not, but if your computer is rather slow compared to the current generation of microprocessors (1.5 Gigahertz being the latest), a 3-D Accelerator may be a good investment as it can help speed up applications and be reused when you upgrade or change your motherboard.

The 3-D Accelerator card contains a mini-processor and an amount of memory necessary to deal with the various graphical instructions to be displayed on the monitor. Most, if not all, use the specialized Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) slot on the motherboard, which allows the video card to communicate directly to the processor prior to sending the signal to the display device.

Thus, with the combination of these three items (memory, processor and AGP), drawing a picture on the screen is faster and more efficient then letting the main computer processor calculate the picture and then send it to the monitor via the "slow" system on the motherboard.

What do you need to upgrade to a 3-D Accelerator card?

First of all, you must make sure you have an AGP slot on your motherboard. Most computers with a Pentium 2 processor and up usually have a brown colored slot in the middle of the board (usually next to the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) expansion slot, which is white). There are 3-D Accelerator cards that can utilize the PCI slot but it does not provide the same efficiency as the AGP.

There are many graphics cards on the market to suit your individual needs. Some offer high memory while others offer TV out-ports so you can send your DVD movies to a television set. Some cards even offer a video in-port so you can digitize your vacation video of Bali.

Of course, the more memory your video card has the better, but the minimum video memory obligation is 16 megabytes. I say this based on the requirements of new games. Only the fanatical game enthusiasts can obtain (and afford) the high-powered accelerator cards.

Finally, but most importantly, is the video driver. A driver is the software that links the operating system to the graphics card. Depending on which hardware and software you have, the video driver is vital. Some drivers work well with Windows 98 but can cause problems in Windows 2000. Getting the best working software driver for your video card is imperative.

The latest driver may not be truly compatible with your system or the latest 3-D game, so knowing where to find a driver that works with your operating system is critical. The graphics card assemblers (such as Asus, Leadtek or Innovision) may have the drivers on their websites. You can otherwise look for them at the manufacturers website (companies such as Nvidia, ATI, 3Dfx), who make the actual processors the assemblers use on the 3-D Accelerator cards.

If you feel you need faster graphics but don't want to empty the piggy bank, buy a mid-level (read: a year old) graphics card so you can at least catch up on today's standards. Further research online can provide you with complete answers to your requirements. Try Cnet (http://www.cnet.com) or Indogamer (http://www.indogamer.com) for more information. The communities there are friendly and ready with a helping hand.