I’ve talked about graphics cards at several points in the past. There is a new card in town and this gives me the opportunity to tell you about it as well as some other important information regarding graphics cards and CorelDRAW.

Gérard Metrailler of Corel Corporation recently posted something in his blog on graphics cards. His main point was that CorelDRAW does not use the 3D functions of a graphics card and so it is the 2D performance of the cards that is important. In fact, he referenced an article at Tom’s Hardware that describes in detail the 2D performance of graphics cards. After reading the article, I came away knowing that the latest nVidia cards had much better 2D performance than the latest ATI cards. Even so, the nVidia cards weren’t far and away faster than graphics built in to many low-end motherboards. The issue seems to be that both nVidia and ATI were so focused on 3D performance in their latest drivers that they haven’t fully optimized the 2D performance. Regardless of which brand of card you use, this is just another reminder that you should keep up-to-date on your drivers since they can improve stability and performance.

Gérard did publish an update later that said Corel CONNECT would benefit from a faster 3D graphics card due to the way it was built. Even if CorelDRAW doesn’t take advantage of 3D performance, there are probably other things on your system that would benefit. The biggest benefit can be for gamers, but many pieces of Windows use 3D performance.

All this leads to the latest and great nVidia card to be released. The GTX 480 series of cards are the first from nVidia to take advantage of DirectX 11 and they also support a whole laundry list of other features to improve the performance and display on your monitor. Of the new batch of cards, I liked the PNY XLR8 GTX 480. It will definitely give you a lot of bang, though it does cost a few bucks. Check it out!