Beginners guide to video cards

[cadaversinc]

Hello, I'm rather new to the computer field and I'm finding myself lost at sea without a paddle. I was looking at the plethora of terms and specs of video cards out there today and I was wondering if anyone could recomend a begginer guide to explaining it all.
I was looking at the guide found on toms hardware, unfortunately, there are still some terms that are unfamiliar to me (bus speed, bandwidth...) If anyone could reccomend a link or site that would get me started I would be most appreciative.

 

[xtknight]

Lots of these are actually general hardware terms ("bus speed" and "bandwidth"). Graphics terms are shader, vertex, render outputs/raster operations (ROPs), transmission units (TMUs), and many more. Have you tried wikipedia for the terms?

About buses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_bus
Bandwidth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth
GPU info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_card
2D video card basics: http://www.karbosguide.com/hardware/module7b1.htm
Programmable shaders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_shader

A Primer to 3D Graphics - Part 1
A Primer to 3D Graphics - Part 2
The 3D Pipeline
The Direct3D Transformation Pipeline

There's also bus width which with graphics cards generally refers to how many lanes of data there are between the GPU and memory (4x64-bit = 256-bit in a lot of cases). Anand had a good explanation of ATI's 512-bit ring-bus in the first R520 article.

R580 features
R520 features

Edit: added more links.

 

[betasub]

nice links, xtknight. Good work!

 

[tuteja1986]

we could help you by telling us what Monitor you use " Size , Resoultion "
What games you play :? BF2 , Oblivion , HL 2 , CS:S ect
What is your buget :?
AGP or PCI express :?
Long time investment :?

 

[cadaversinc]

i'm running a 21in crt, at 1600x1200
I play bf2 & oblivion at the moment, and going to be playing crysis and such
my budget is around $400 for one card
and def PCI-e
and I would probabaly keep the set-up until the neext best thing along

 

[tuteja1986]

easy choice

X1900XT

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/nvi...rce_7900_gt_gtx_performance/page10.asp