I am back, this time with another tech article.

As the name might suggest, it’s all about picking up the

right graphics card for your PC from the shop. Hey, just wait a sec! I will try to make this as interesting as
possible and by the way, after you read AND remember the tips and information I provided you, you
would most certainly saved from shopkeepers’ fraud. It’s all business. If they even have a DirectX7
graphics card of the old times, they would sell it by saying’ Yeah, runs everything’. ‘Course those people
who are ‘in’ the graphics business would know that he is lying but the point is that those who aren’t
would never. Shouldn’t it be fairer? They should get a better bargain and value for money than a
DirectX7 graphics card!

So enough for the introductions! Let’s begin.

The ‘right’ card would vary from person to person because they all have their own preferences and
requirements. If you don’t even want to do gaming at all, just have a nice GPU to power, say graphics
designing and run Windows 7, any modern DirectX9 card with Shader Model 2.0 or above would do. This
would include the NVIDIA Geforce FX Series onwards although my recommendation would be to go for
no less than a Geforce 6 graphics card. In the case of ATI, it doesn’t matter. You just need to have a DX9
GPU with SM(Shader Model)2.0. The reason for the bias here is, the FX series sucked. Sorry any FX users
or fans!

If you’re a big enthusiast, a gamer on large screens, then certainly you would be looking for a
card that maxes out every single video game in the market that you throw at it. That kind of cards, also
usually known as high-end cards can easily be identified by searching on Google and their performance
review can be checked on tech sites like Guru3d.com. What the sites basically do is that they test the
graphic cards on a number of games and determine how smoothly games run on the card at what
particular settings and resolutions. They also pit the competing makes of cards targeted for the same
market and provide a conclusion as to which is the better card and which should the buyers be looking
at.

Then there are the guys who are prepared to compromise on graphics quality and in-game
resolutions. We all love better looks, but the problem here is many of us are also income-constrained.
You can only have a better card if you have the money for it and high end card usually are very
expensive. The ‘mainstream’ cards cards here come into play- the cash crop of the GPU companies.
Most of us would opt for mainstream cards and would like to max out probably MOST, but not ALL of
the games in the market at just fairly high resolutions, not the uber-high ones the enthusiasts look for. If
you are having a monitor till 19”, you can expect a nice mainstream card to do that.

You might be wondering why I didn’t provide that ‘information’ I promised you about. The
problem is that if I incorporate more techy terms, weird numbers and confusing model numbers in this
article, it will all become very boring for you. Moreover, the details would only remain valid for a limited
amount of time. 500Mhz clock speed of a GPU core might be considered good for now but not in the
next three years.

You also would like to be alerted by one of the misconceptions in most of the people who aren’t
‘in’ the cards. They believe that memory of a card is the most important factor in determining a card’s
performance. It is not wholly wrong but its certainly incorrect to a large extent. If you follow this
misconception, you might be amazed at how, for example a card with 1GB of memory is offered at a
lower price than a card with, say, 512MB of memory. REMEMBER THIS. Memory only helps when you
bunp your resolutions higher and when you enable advanced graphic enhanced filtering options like
Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering.

You would want to know, then, how do we look for the ‘right’ card if memory is NOT the
determinant in its performance. The answer: Something else is. I mentioned it earlier in the article in
passing. The shader and memory clock speeds. Take it like this, the faster they are, the faster the card’s
components- the shaders and the memory, work. Faster card components = Faster in=game
performance.

The DirectX model supported by the card is also important along with the Shader Model version.
The thing is that newer games make use of the more recent DirectX versions to increase the graphics
quality and unlock new technological breakthroughs- like DirectX 10 debuted with ‘God Rays’ and highly
realistic ‘Motion Blur’. You would want to have the latest DirectX version on the market supported by
your card so you can run and enjoy the latest games in all of their glory and feel. You think I am just
raving? Check some game’s difference in image quality when switched between older and newer DirectX
versions.

I suppose I will keep writing forever if I didn’t stop myself right now. I vowed to help the
beginners in their buy, not to make them suffer from an information overload. Well that’s all friends.
This is quite enough for a beginner to go out on his own to the PC market and not get fooled by any
shopkeepers.