How do I choose a video card?

[questioner1]

I have been looking on the internet for some time, but i can't seem to understand what is good about one video card and bad about it.
i want to have a good video card for gaming.
i dont really have a price in mind but 500 euro is too expensive. maybe about 200 euro. anyway.
what are the things that seperate video cards?
theres video memory. thats all i understand. and i know that some have antialiasing and different forms of it. but i dont get it all. games say that a requirement is ati Radeon X1800 or higher, or something. i dont get all that. thats a model, that i know, but i dont know what " higher" is.

i want to understand what it is. how much is 512 mb for example?
is that like, more than enough for the most demanding games out there? or what? what does the video memory even do? what will become better? and the Gpu too. i dont get it.

thank you.

 

[Fred]

My understanding of video cards is lacking as well, but I'll give it a go. Anyone please correct me if I'm wrong about something.

First of all, when it says this video card or higher, higher would typically just indicate a higher model number/faster card (ie: x300<x400). There are a few things that indicate a better video card. One would be a higher clock speeds on both the memory and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). This basically enables it to do things faster. Another thing would be the amount of RAM on a video card. RAM on a video card does the same thing as RAM on your motherboard does, it serves as temporary memory. The more, the better and the faster, the better thus ddr<ddr2<ddr3. I hope this helps a bit..

 

[RHochstenbach]

If you want a good graphics card that doesn't cost more than €200, I'd suggest getting the NVidia Geforce 8800GT. It's a fast card for a low price.
The most games these days require about 256-512 MB of video RAM.
You can find a good one here

The video memory stores the graphics that need to be rendered by a game. The memory speed is the speed where the memory can be accessed. The GPU processess all instructions. The performance of the card depends on the GPU speed. So a graphics card with a GPU of 500 MHz and 128 MB of graphics RAM is faster than a GPU of 300 MHz with 128 MB of graphics RAM.