Monitors are connected to the computer through the socket (port) of a video card that is inserted into a motherboard slot. Different video cards support different monitor resolutions, number of colors, and refresh rates. To take full advantage of monitor capabilities, a matching video card should be used. Typical video card standards (types) are shown. Video cards have its own memory that is used to store the bit pattern representing the image displayed on the monitor screen. Typical sizes for video card memories are 16 and 32 MB. As an example, consider a card that supports 800 x 600 resolution and 256 colors. For this number of colors, 8 bits are needed to encode each pixel (256 = 28). Thus the minimum size needed for the card memory = 800 x 600 x 8 = 3840000 bytes = 3750 KB.
