Video card

A video card (also referred to as a graphics card, graphics adapter, or video adapter) is circuitry with video RAM that can output a video signal from a computer to a display. Many modern cards also contain their own processors for graphics acceleration and are refered to a graphics processing units (GPUs).

History
The first Apple II and compact Mac computers contained built-in video circuitry and dedicated a small portion of RAM for use by video memory. 3rd party expansion cards for the Apple II series added capabilities such as 80-column text until the Apple IIe was released in 1983 with such updated video circuitry built-in. The first Macintosh video cards from Apple Computer were developed for the NuBus expansion slots of the Macintosh II series, first released in 1987. In subsequent Macs, NuBus video cards were succeeded by Peripheral Component Interconnect, AGP, PCI eXtended (PCI-X), and PCI Express (PCIe). In some cases, processor direct slots with direct access to the CPU were used. For more recent Macs and mobile devices, Apple designs its own graphics circuitry into its ARM-based processors.

IBM's early Video Graphics Array board for their PC led to the establishment of the VGA standard for personal computers. Current graphics cards and GPUs presently operate over the PCIe standard.