Video graphics array (VGA) is a standard analog computer display first marketed in 1987. VGA serves to translate the computer output to the monitor, The higher the power the VGA has, the better the quality produced.
VGA is also often used to refer to a screen resolution of 640 × 480, whatever the graphics card manufacturer is.The VGA card is useful for translating computer output to the monitor. For the graphic design process or playing a video game, a high-powered graphics card is required.
Manufacturers of famous graphics cards include ATI and nVidia.
Although the VGA standard is no longer used because it has been replaced by newer standards, VGA is still implemented on Pocket PC. VGA is the last graphical standard followed by the majority of manufacturers of computer graphics card maker. Display Windows until now still using VGA mode because it is supported by many manufacturers of monitors and graphics cards.
VGA's success attracted the interest of several companies such as ATI, Cirrs Logic and S3 to develop this technology by increasing resolution capability and number of colors. This spawned standard SVGA resolution technology (Super VGA), with 1024 × 768, 256 color and 2MB memory.
In 1995 came to market 2D / 3D graphics card developed by Matrox, Creative, S3, ATI and others. This graphics card follows SVGA standards but already supports 3D technology.In 1997, 3dfx released Voodoo graphics chip more powerful than other graphics cards at the time, introducing 3D effects technologies such as mip mapping, Z-buffering and anti-aliasing. After the appearance of Voodoo, other 3D graphics cards have emerged like Voodoo2 from 3dfx, TNT and TNT2 made by Nvidia.The bandwidh required by these graphics cards was close to the limit of PCI bus capacity at the time. Intel developed AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) that solved bottleneck problems between microprocessor and graphics card. From 1999 to 2002, Nvidia mastered the graphics card market (beating 3dfx) with its GeForce product.Since 2003, ATI and Nvidia have dominated the graphics card market with their Radeon and GeForce products by almost 90%.
