OS X Mountain Lion For Dummies

Get an Accelerated Graphics Card

An accelerated graphics card is designed to speed up one thing: the screen-update rate. They’re extremely popular with graphic-arts professionals and with gamers. Accelerated graphics cards blast pixels onto your screen at amazing speeds. And because the OS X Quartz Extreme imaging architecture hands off part of its load to the processor on an accelerated graphics card, it might even make your Mac’s other tasks faster because it does some of the work that your Mac’s main processor (CPU) used to do. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that you can use a graphics accelerator only if your Mac has an accelerated PCI slot for it, which is where you install these suckers. Currently, only the Mac Pro models are capable of graphics-card upgrades.

Again, visit www.macworld.com for information on the various graphics cards available and how they compare with one another. Cards start at around $100 and go up from there. And remember, the older your Mac, the greater the performance boost you’ll see.

Consider ordering your next Mac with an upgraded video subsystem. Most Macs today are available with at least two video subsystems; consider ordering the higher-performance model. Let’s put it this way — if you are thinking about upgrading the video in your current ...