The card that converts electronic signal into the language understood by the user is called a display card or a video card.
The display capabilities of a computer, however, depend on both the logical circuitry (provided in the video adapter) and the display monitor. A monochrome monitor, for example, cannot display colors no matter how powerful the video adapter is. The two basic categories of video modes are text and graphics.
- In text mode, a monitor can display only ASCII characters.
- In graphics mode, a monitor can display any bit-mapped image.
- Within the text and graphics mode, some monitors also offer a choice of resolutions.
- At lower resolutions a monitor can display more colors.
- Modern video adapters contain memory, so that the computer's RAM is not used for storing displays.
- In addition, most adapters have their own graphics coprocessor for performing graphics calculations. These adapters are often called graphics accelerators. Video adapters are also called video cards, video boards, video display boards, graphics cards and graphics adapters.
