New boards are coming to market with even faster clock speeds. Midrange chips, such as those in ATI’s Radeon 7500 or NVidia’s GeForce4 MX series, run at about 200 - 250MHz top-of-the-line cards have chips that run from 270 - 300MHz. Integrated graphics chips typically run at clock speeds of about 166 MHz. The graphics processors on today’s boards can efficiently handle impressively sophisticated full-motion 3D video that would stump even the most powerful unaided CPU. Graphics processor: Over the years, graphics processors have taken on more and more of the graphics load from a system’s CPU. ![]() A new card from Matrox, the Parhelia, offers support for up to three displays, and ATI’s All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500DV provides FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports, a wireless remote control and S-Video connections. But games aren’t the only reason to get a new graphics board. Titles based on Microsoft’s DirectX 8 application programming interface are the most recent spur to upgrade such games are just appearing now, after almost a year and a half of anticipation. ![]() Graphics chip and board makers update their hardware every six months, mainly as a response to consumer demand for more complex and more-realistic PC games. Budget cards let you play most games at moderate resolutions, but die-hard gamers should opt for more power.
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