The images that appear on your monitor (screen) come from a piece of equipment in your computer called a video card. There are three basic criteria for selecting a good video card: the amount of onboard RAM, the manufacturer, and the bus type.

The amount of RAM you need on your video card is relative to your monitor size. For a 15-inch monitor, 2MB is sufficient; for a 17-inch monitor, 4MB is the right amount.

Bus or interface refers to the type of slot that the video card fits into inside your computer. ISA is an older style bus, while PCI and AGP are the current technologies.

There are dozens of video card makers but only a handful are considered industry standard, top-performing products. The leading video card makers you should consider are Matrox, Diamond, Number Nine, and ATI.

When purchasing your new system, insist on at least 2MB of Video RAM, a PCI or AGP interface, and make sure the card is manufactured by Matrox, Diamond, Number Nine, or ATI.

That info is REALLY old. Like 10 years old or something. You want at least 64MB of video memory, none of the companies except ATI that were listed even have a credible market share anymore. In fact the only other one that even exists to my knowledge is matrox. You should buy either ATI or nVidia video cards and if you want to play games you should get geforce 5200 or better or ati 9200 or better. ISA slots don't even exist anymore. PCI slots aren't used for video cards anymore. Get something with minimum 4x agp.

The info is right. Just in todays environment, people want to do more than
use word and excel. To display the average number of pixels for a 17inch
screen does require 4mb video memory, but its next to useless for anything.
As you said min these days should be a geForce 5200 or Radeon 9200 as a
min with 64mb ram. If you want to play games, a Radeon 9800 pro or better
or a GeForce FX5700 are about the min.

to play most games it says you require at least 128mb of RAM. As for DVD's then you definitely need at least 128mb.

this info isn't so old really, anyone using an IGP now is only using about 8MB, now OpenGL and Direct3D are a diffent story, frame sizes can be many MB, thus why the fast RAM is needed on graphics cards now, the capacity isn't so important. graphisc cards are like air compressors, the RAM is like the tank, Gpu like the motor, AGP/PCI/ISA/PCIExpressx16 like air intake. sure the capacity can be nice and all, but if it's slow, say 400Mhz compared to 1000MHz then there won't be any performance diffence between a 256MB and 128MB. it's just serving no purpose other then being able to brag. now with some rendering application the extra RAM is needed even if slow, but your typical user won't use such things.