There's a good chance the most powerful chip inside your PC, in raw computational terms, is on your graphics card. So, how did graphics get so powerful, what are graphics cards good for right now and how on earth do you choose from the baffling array of 3D chipsets on offer?
A little history
The origin of today's 3D monsters can be traced back to ancient 2D cards designed to improve the resolution and colour fidelity of the PC. The very earliest cards had specifications that seem impossibly modest by today's standards.
The first truly modern graphics processing units (GPUs) arrived in 2001. Nvidia's GeForce 3 and the Radeon 8500 from ATI were the world's first GPUs to support so-called programmable shaders designed to enable more realistic lighting within graphical 3D simulations. Since then, no other company has been able to keep up with the relentless pace of those two brands (though ATI was bought by AMD in 2006).
Early programmable chips could typically apply their shading effects to just four pixels per operating cycle. Since then, GPUs have become ever more powerful, programmable and, most of all, parallel. AMD's Radeon HD 4800, for instance, packs a ludicrous 800 shader units (also known as stream processors in a nod to their increasingly programmable nature).
Current cards also sport huge memory buffers as big as 1GB, enabling them to drive extremely high-resolution displays, and are backed up by massive bus bandwidth thanks to the PCI Express interface in its latest 2.0 format. Finally, the very latest development in graphics technology is support for multiple cards sharing the rendering load...
Author: Jeremy Laird
Read more from Tech Radar: Guide to Graphics Cards