For all you budding or already defined "gamers", what comes first when you consider buying a system, is the graphics card. Now i've heard a lot of people discussing among a consortium, the importance of a graphics card & going into the intricacy of such highly defined anomalies as the processor speed. But when you get down to the basics of how it all works , from 2D graphics to the conversion into 3D, it gets all the more interesting.

What do you understand by graphics ?

* The images you see on your monitor are made of tiny dots called pixels. A Screen generally displays over a million pixels, & an image is created using these very pixels. To do this, the computer needs a translator : something to take binary data from the CPU & turn it into a picture you can see. Unless a computer has graphics capability built into the motherboard i.e a graphics accelerator , that translation takes place on the graphics card decides how to use the pixel on the screen to create the images. It then sends that information to the monitor through a cable .

* To get a 3D image, the graphics card creates a wired frame out of the pixels and then fills up the remaining pixels. for high speed games , the computer goes through the same process about sixty times a second . This means it display around 60 frames per second (FPS) . Compared to this, the human eye can process about 25 frames per second . This in itself defines the difference between a human processor and the graphics card.

Components of the frame rate are:

* Triangles or vertices per second: 3D images are made of triangles or polygon. It describes how quickly the card builds a wire frame image.

* Pixel fill rate: This measurement describes how many pixels the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) can process in a second, which translates to how quickly it can rasterise or fill the image.

Now that you know how it works, lets see what works the best. In the gaming market today, the most popular name is NVIDIA geforce series. But a lesser known , better buy is the ATI Radeon series.

* NVIDIA is taking the brute force approach - its top - of the range cards are the Best in the business, but they are expensive.

* ATI on the other hand has been concentrating on making its own 4800 series offer energy efficiency & value for money. The result of this has been that ATI has managed to catch up with NVIDIA after lagging behind for so long.

Go out in the market & ask for these Graphics Cards, if u want a game like Crysis to work at a lag-less speed of 120FPS , presenting the top 2 Graphics cards in this world:

* Nvidia Geforce GTX295- This is an incredibly fast card - the fastest in the world, ever, in fact. But you r going to need a really big screen in order to appreciate its twin - GPU prowess. Owners of lower resolution screens can spend a lot less money & enjoy just as fast frame rates. When i say fast, it means the 3D image that the graphics card renders in the form of triangles, is renedered at a faster pace.

* ATI Radeon 4870 X2 -"Two graphics chips.One card" And a whole lotta rendering fun: thats the basic philosophy behind the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, AMDs latest dual- GPU 3D card.

Unbinding the clustered plethora of thoughts & fallacies that people have about graphics , the above articles presents a clear picture of what actually a "Graphics Card" does. Go out & build a system that the world goes "Green with envy", looking at.