Graphics card history: from the early phase to the modern GPU Tube fibrillation The Voodoo King The first GPU ATI’s surprise hit PCI Express and SLI Article in c’t 27/2020 read Graphics cards in the PC were ridiculed for a long time, because the PC was mainly used as a work device and the monitor mainly showed ASCII – Characters in set 24 lines and 80 columns. But with the advent of graphical user interfaces and increasingly complex games, the graphics card also gained in importance.

In the initial phase of the PC, IBM itself still produced 8-bit graphics cards for the ISA slot. They mostly worked in the “Monochrome Display Adapter” standard (MDA), a pure text mode with 80 columns and 25 lines – each character was fixed 9 × 14 Pixels allocated, the total resolution was 720 × 350 pixels. The image pixels could not yet be controlled individually. This was only possible with an optional graphics card, the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA), after which the standard of the same name was named. With this card there was then the choice of 16 colors with 160 × 100 pixels or 320 × 192 Pixels with four full colors.

However, just one year after the introduction of the IBM PC, suppliers such as Hercules offered plug-in cards that combined both modes .

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