Computer Video Cards

The first IBM PC video card released with the first IBM PC was developed by in 1981. The MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter) could only work in text mode. It only had 80 columns and 25 lines (80x25) in the screen. It had a whopping 4KB of video memory and was monochrome meaning just one color.

   In 1995 the first consumer 2D/3D cards were released. These were developed by Matrox, Creative, S3, ATI and other companies. These video cards followed the SVGA standard, but incorporated 3D functions. In 1997, 3dfx released the Voodoo graphics chip introducing 3D effects such mip mapping, Z-buffering and anti-aliasing into the consumer market. Consequently, a series of 3D video cards were released, such as Voodoo2 from 3dfx, TNT and TNT2 from NVIDIA. The bandwidth required by these cards was approaching the limits of the PCI bus capacity. Intel developed the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) which solved the bottleneck between the microprocessor and the video card. From 1999 until 2002, NVIDIA controlled the video card market with the GeForce family. The improvements carried out at this time were focused in 3D algorithms and graphics processor clock rate. Video memory was also increased to improve their data rate; DDR technology was incorporated, improving the capacity of video memory from 32 MB with GeForce to 128 MB with GeForce 4.