Usually, a graphics card comes in the form of a printed circuit board (expansion board) which is to be inserted into an expansion slot. Applications of general-purpose computing on graphics cards include AI training, cryptocurrency mining, and molecular simulation. Additionally, computing platforms such as OpenCL and CUDA allow using graphics cards for general-purpose computing. The graphics processing unit can be used for additional processing, which reduces the load from the central processing unit. Most graphics cards are not limited to simple display output. A graphics processing unit (GPU) that performs the necessary computations is the main component in a graphics card, but the acronym 'GPU' is sometimes also used to erroneously refer to the graphics card as a whole. Graphics cards are sometimes called discrete or dedicated graphics cards to emphasize their distinction to integrated graphics processor on the motherboard or the CPU. Sapphire Radeon HD 5570, a PCI Express video card with VGA, HDMI, and DVI ports and a small cooling fanĪ graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or colloquially GPU) is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a display device such as a monitor.
