PCI video cards are simply graphics cards that connect to the motherboard of a computer through a PCI bus slot. The first true dedicated graphics solutions were PCI video cards from companies such as Nvidia.
History
One of the first wide spread PCI graphics cards was the Nvidia TNT and TNT2 video cards. It contained 32 MB of video memory and had a factory clock speed starting at 90 Mhz. Currently the PCI video card is an obsolete technology by two generations, namely AGP video cards and the current PCIe video cards.
Function
PCI video cards have data passed across the system bus to them through the PCI expansion slot. This data is then computed, rendered and finally output to a monitor as video graphics.
Benefits
The PCI video card allowed for graphically intense calculations to be off-loaded from the processor and sent to a dedicated graphics processing unit. This delivered a two-fold performance increase as dedicated PCI video cards were more efficient at rendering video graphics and it also freed up processor time to do other things.
Types
The main contenders for PCI video cards were Nvidia and ATI. ATI's original competition against Nvidia's TNT PCI video card was the 3dfx Voodoo series cards. Until the now deprecated AGP was released, there were many different PCI video card designs and memory configurations.
Fun Fact
Graphics cards are most often attributed to their respective designers such as Nvidia or ATI. However, technically speaking Nvidia and ATI do not produce graphics cards. ATI and Nvidia design the video card architecture and lease the rights to produce the cards to different manufacturing companies such as ASUS, EVGA and Diamond Multimedia.
Tags: video cards, graphics cards, video card, cards Nvidia, cards were