News: General

Video Now, Video Then

by Keith R. Wheeler

10/26/2004

If you’ve seen specifications for the current cutting edge video cards, you’ll see that they’re several times more powerful than the entire computer systems we were using back in 1987 (comparing current systems to my first PC, the IBM Personal System/2 Model 30). When IBM released the specs for VGA, video graphics array, it was cutting edge with 640 x 480 pixels using 16 colors. This required 256 kB of memory on the video card. VGA could also display 256 colors, but the resolution would have to be turned down to 320 x 200. Today, both ATI and Nvidia offer cards with roughly the same specifications: resolutions up to 2048 x 1536, 32-bit color, support for two monitors. In order to achieve the high resolution with 32-bit color, these cards have 256 MB on-board – a full 1000 times the memory of original VGA. 32-bit color uses 24 bits to define the color and it uses 8 bits for an alpha channel. In order to keep this somewhat brief, 32-bit color generates 16.7 million colors – over 1 million times more than the original VGA standard at full resolution. Original VGA used a total of 307,200 pixels at maximum resolution. The ATI and Nvidia cards can use more than 3.14 million pixels – 10 times the pixel count. Assuming similar costs, the current cards are 1000 x 1 million x 10 times = 10 billion times better than the original VGA standard. But just to be sure you can still use WordPerfect 5.1 the way it was originally designed, the new cards can still display 640 x 480, just like good old VGA.