Difference between graphics companies???

[SuperCheetah]

What is the difference in the different graphics cards such as Hercules card based on Kyro and other cards? Others I'm curious about are the Voodoo cards, ATI cards, etc. How are they all different in architecture and what is each card good at doing?

 

[Arris]

A good read for a start would be the article by accelenation which I posted a link to here
That should give you a bit of background information about the different chip manufacturers since some make their own cards and others just produce the chips and the likes of Asus, VisionTek, Gainward, Elsa, Leadtek etc. make the actual cards. ATI make their own cards but recently have had Hercules produce cards based on their Radeon GPUs (Hercules also have done Kyro based cards in the past).

ATI and Matrox have always been renouned for good 2D clarity whilst Nvidia are more well known for powerful 3d cards. Its only recently that ATI have had a good stab at coming back into the powerhouse category of cards. Then you have 3DLabs who Creative recently bought who specialise in cards for business use.

As I said check out the linked article as its a very informative read.