The GPU ( 'Graphical;Processing Unit') is responsible for all operations that deal with graphics. It is located on the videocard/graphics card and acts as a coprocessor for you main processing unit (Central Processing Unit) which is in large part responsible for the performance of all functions of a computer. It is located on the motherboard. This is the so-called "smart". An effective "GPU" depends mainly on its generation.

Graphics cards that include new graphics processors work much faster than the old ones. Here are some details on the graphics cards.

• The graphics card interfaces with the PC monitor
• Currently, there are two main developers of graphics card processors that exist: ATI® (now owned by AMD®) and NVidia®. Then, other manufacturers incorporates either an ATI chip or NVidia chip on their graphics card.
• Current technologies for managing the 3D revolve around Direct3D Microsoft® and OpenGL®.
• If your graphics card has an HDMI connector, it is well suited for the future. However,without the HDCP (High Bandwidth Digital Control Protection), a shield against illegal copying, your graphics card will not be able to display HD content (Blue - Ray or HD-DVD and others).
• These days, the amount of RAMis critical for video editing - especially for AVCHD or HD content. Users of Studio with HD footage or proDAD Vitascene require a minumum of 256 MB. Note that proDAD VitaScene (uses the GPU exclusively for rendering. Avoid "TurboCache" on nVidia cards and "HyperMemory" on ATI cards since these "features" rely on system memory in addition to a small amount of RAM on the GPU. Use of the system RAM means that there will be less RAM available for the operating systems or other applications....
• SLI® (Scalable Link Interface-nVidia) or CrossFire® (ATI) does not do much for video editing (as opposed to video game enthusiasts who use this technology to run graphics cards in tandem.
• Windows Vista® has a new "Aero" interface design which manages the 3D natively. This uses up some GPU processing power. So, one can expect somewhat poorer performance for the same GPU with Vista compared to XP. However, Vista also controls how video memory is being used, so video memory is actually used somewhat more judiciously in Vista.
• To relieve the CPU of certain tasks related to HD display, ATI has launched "AVIVO" while nVidia has launched "Pure Video". This gives an additional performance boost for real time rendering and visualization, but the technologies are still in their infancy.