Ok, it's time to put your tech-head thinking caps on…. A video board requires memory to store textures and the images it renders. In older video solutions such as 3dfx's (3Dfx back then) Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo 2, the accelerators utilized separate memory systems for textures and frame/Z-buffers. Today UMA's or Unified Memory Architectures are much more common. What this means in practice is that the video board can divide the on-board memory in any way it sees fit to meet requirements for either increased resolutions, color depths or texture sizes.

Frame buffer (memory) The frame buffer is what a video board uses to store the images it renders, be they 2D desktops or 3D graphics in one of today's many 3D accelerated titles. The amount of frame buffer memory a video board has directly impacts which resolutions it can support, the more memory you've got the higher resolutions your board will support and at higher bit depths.

Bit depths When we refer to bit depths here at Sharky Extreme what we're referring to is the number of bits (0's or 1's) that contain the color value of an individual pixel. In the old days when VGA was common a computer image used 8 bits per pixel (8bpp) to produce the final pixel on screen, 8bpp is just 256 colors, 9bpp would be the double 512, and 10bpp 1024 and so on. Today when we talk about bit-depths we usually only mention 16, 24 or 32bit.

16bit is equal to 65 536 different possible colors being represented on screen at once. 24 or 32bit means 16.7 Million different colors on screen at once. Now you're probably thinking that 32bit should be more than 24 bit if what we said earlier about the number of colors possible on screen doubled per additional bit, that is not the case. 32bit is only used as for some reason a 32bit value is easier to handle than a 24bit one and hence means that the hardware can perform things faster at 32bit than at 24bit, but with more memory being required (roughly 25%). With the next generation video cards harboring 32MB of memory this will be important.