Buyer's Guide: Graphics Cards

Ask a typical gamer or PC enthusiast which graphics card he wants to go into his next system, and it's likely that he'll either have one picked out or can launch into a long discussion of the pros and cons of the contenders he has in mind. But ask a typical business user the same question, and it's likely that -- unless he works in a field that involves a lot of 3D screen work, such as computer-aided design (CAD) -- he's barely given the choice of a graphics card a second thought.

There are some practical reasons for this, of course. For starters, the hardcore gamer is expecting to make regular use of the system in ways that rely heavily on his chosen graphics card(s). He also views the PC in question as something to have fun with, whereas corporate and small business users typically view their desktops as tools needed to get work done.

So it's somewhat understandable that not as much attention gets paid to the graphics cards that go into office systems. But as a result, business users have been shortchanging themselves and limiting their possibilities in building, buying, or upgrading their workstations.

With just a little more time and maybe (but not necessarily) a little more money put into their choices of graphics cards, business users can end up with desktop PCs that better meet their working needs. Done right, they stand a pretty good chance of increasing productivity and minimizing frustrations with systems that might not otherwise well meet their needs.

Where Does One Start?

As with most computer upgrades, the first step in choosing a graphics card is determining what one's needs are and working from there. Ask yourself: How do you expect to make use of your workstation? What do you need it to be able to do? And what do you wish that it could do? And if you're thinking that these questions might not have much to do with one's graphics card, think again. Because at the end of the day, almost everything we do on our computers is powered by our graphics cards.

Take, for example, someone who spends a lot of time working with spreadsheets. This is about as basic as it gets, right? And it's not exactly an activity that screams high-end graphics. But how much easier might that work be if that person could simultaneously open a bunch of spreadsheets across a bunch of monitors?

Even with a relatively large monitor, there's only so much one can fit onto a single display. And while just about everyone is familiar with dual-display setups, fewer might be aware that there are affordable graphics cards that can let you use as many as six displays.

Learning the Lingo

If you're new to shopping for graphics cards, you might quickly start feeling like a stranger in a land of strange words, abbreviations and acronyms. And while neither the good folks at Berlitz nor the makers of Rosetta Stone software have programs to help with this particular language, there is no shortage of resources available (led by HardwareCentral's sister site Webopedia.com). To spare you the browsing, however, we'll list a few of the more important terms here:

2D, 3D and, well, 3D: Phrases like "professional 2D" refer to a class of graphics cards for workstations with multi-display support for two-dimensional graphics and applications. More powerful 3D graphics accelerators, used for applications like CAD, digital content creation, and gaming, specialize in using geometric shapes, patterns, and lighting effects to render three-dimensional objects and models on the 2D screen. Lately, however, 3D can also refer to 3D-movie-style stereoscopic imaging and special glasses that add the effect of a third dimension to the experience of looking at a monitor.

ATI: A subsidiary of AMD since 2006, ATI has been around since way back in the '80s, developing graphics solutions for PCs for about as long as PCs have existed. Like its archrival Nvidia Corp., ATI offers separate lines or brands of graphics cards for consumer desktops and professional workstations -- Radeon and FirePro, respectively -- plus variations such as the Mobility Radeon chipsets used in laptops.

Crossfire and SLI: ATI's Crossfire and Nvidia's Scalable Link Interface are competing methods that allow a computer to make use of two or more graphics cards, working in conjunction to boost performance.

GPU: A graphics processing unit, initially developed by Nvidia, is a dedicated processor that handles the calculations needed to render 3D graphics on your system, freeing the system CPU for other tasks. A GPU -- or, for a few top-of-the-line cards, two GPUs -- on a dedicated (also known as a discrete) graphics card almost always provides higher performance than GPU circuitry built into an integrated-graphics chipset or into a CPU such as Intel's Core i3 and Core i5.

GDDR2/3/4/5 SGRAM: A GPU uses an area of memory called a frame buffer to hold the display information sent to the monitor. Graphics Double Data Rate Synchronous Graphics Random Access Memory is a type of RAM used with graphics cards, offering improved bandwidth for this purpose over generic SDRAM. GDDR5, the latest iteration of these standards, made its way onto graphics cards in 2008 and appears on higher-end cards, though cards with GDDR3 are still available as of this writing.

Just as a dedicated GPU gives faster results than the system CPU for graphics calculations, a dedicated store of speedy graphics memory yields better performance than an integrated graphics solution that borrows a part of system memory for the job. Graphics memory performance is all about bandwidth; a low-end card might have a 64-bit-wide interface to 256MB of onboard GDDR3, a faster card a 512-bit interface to 1GB of GDDR5.