A video card, also known as a graphics accelerator card, display adapter, or graphics card, is a hardware component whose function is to generate and output images to a display. It operates on similar principles as a sound card or other peripheral devices.

The term is usually used to refer to a separate, dedicated expansion card that is plugged into a slot on the computer's motherboard, as opposed to a graphics controller integrated into the motherboard chipset. An integrated graphics controller may be referred to as an "integrated graphics processor" (IGP).

Some video cards offer added functions, such as video capture, TV tuner adapter, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoding or even FireWire, mouse, light pen, joystick connectors, or even the ability to connect multiple monitors.

A common misconception regarding video cards is that they are strictly used for Video games; a misconception that companies take advantage of in order to sell their products by advertising their products as if they were in fact video consoles. Video cards instead have a much broader range of capability. Being specialized for video output Video Cards improve what a computer monitor displays. As well, they play a very important role for Graphic Designers and 3D Animators, who tend to require optimum displays for their work as well as faster rendering in order to efficiently tone up their work.

Video cards are not used exclusively in IBM type PCs; they have been used in devices such as Commodore Amiga (connected by the slots Zorro II and Zorro III), Apple II, Apple Macintosh, Atari Mega ST/TT (attached to the MegaBus or VME interface), Spectravideo SVI-328, MSX, and in video game consoles.

The first IBM PC video card, which was released with the first IBM PC, was developed by IBM in 1981. The MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter) could only work in text mode representing 25x80 lines in the screen. It had a 4KB video memory and just one color.

Starting with the MDA in 1981, several video cards were released, which are summarized in the attached table.

VGA was widely accepted, which led some corporations such as ATI, Cirrus Logic and S3 to work with that video card, improving its resolution and the number of colours it used. And so was born the SVGA (Super VGA) standard, which reached 2 MB of video memory and a resolution of 1024x768 at 256 color mode.

In 1995 the first consumer 2D/3D cards were released, developed by Matrox, Creative, S3 and ATI, and others.Fact: date=June 2008 Those video cards followed the SVGA standard, but incorporated 3D functions. In 1997, 3dfx released the Voodoo graphics chip, which was very powerful compared to other consumer graphics cards, introducing 3D effects such mip mapping, Z-buffering and anti-aliasing into the consumer market. From this point, a series of 3D video cards were released, like Voodoo2 from 3dfx, TNT and TNT2 from NVIDIA. The bandwidth required by these cards was approaching the limits of the PCI bus capacity. Intel developed the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) which solved the bottleneck between the microprocessor and the video card. From 1999 until 2002, NVIDIA controlled the video card market (taking over 3dfx) with the GeForce family.Fact: date=June 2008 The improvements carried out in these years were focused in 3D algorithms and graphics processor clock rate. Nevertheless, video memory also needed to improve their data rate, and DDR technology was incorporated. The capacity of video memory goes in this period from 32 MB with GeForce to 128 MB with GeForce 4.