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In case an AGP slot is available, there are basically no limitations since almost every card available in the stores will work on your system. Thus, it is mostly a question of matching the personal needs with the price range of the available cards. In other words, there are expensive and less expensive cards on the shelves, with different options as TV-out, video-in up to the built in TV-tuner and the 3D-glasses.

Try to make a decision based on what you really need and, if possible, on what is on sale. Last month's model will be no more outdated three months down the road than the latest and greatest card at twice the price. In general, 3D glasses are a marketing gig since they require a monitor running at a minimum of 100 Hz vertical refresh rate, and then still lead to bad headaches after about 20 min.

Even though this is a blatant generalization, there are a few patterns among the different manufacturers:

• in most cases, the GeForce-based video cards are the fastest cards around but the image quality slightly lags behind other products and layouts.
• ATi historically had the best cards when it comes to DVD decoding since most of their cards have a hardware DVD decoder already built in.
• 3dfx (VooDoo) are the cards that use the least CPU resources and, therefore are optimally suited for slower systems in that they bring out the best, even when upgrading an older system.
• Matrox cards have exellent 2D quality and color display but are not too fast in 3D applications in general and "OpenGL" applications specifically.
• Savage4-based cards (even though they are on their way out), offer the unique feature of S3 texture compression (S3TC), a neat feature that allows transfer of textures in compressed format. Beware, though, the AGP version does not harmonize well with the VIA MVP3 chipset (AMD K6-2 based systems)

In many cases, that is, either in older systems or in those based on the Intel i810 chipset and eMachines, there will be no AGP slot available, forcing the upgrader to chose from the meager assortment of PCI video cards. In this case, the best recommendation is to grab what you can get because most stores don't even carry these cards anymore. Also, don't skimp on the memory, that is, don't even consider anything under 16 MB of on-board, dedicated graphics memory.

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