Will video card aid in graphic performance?

I used Intel onboard 915 Graphic chipsets before, and recently I bought a Sapphire x550 128MB card, for playing some 2nd level game, such as Doom 3. -__-

Apart from playing game, I would like to ask will video card aids in graphic tools? such as photoshop, acd see, which increase in computing speed? Some people says graphic cards give no help in Photoshop, as it uses RAM mainly instead of memory of graphic card.

>___<

Depends on video cards support of the graphic accelerations used by Windows. With exception to really old video cards, even cheapest of video cards have support for type of video acceleration used by Windows and apps. However, MS's next shell is supposed to make use of features found in newer cards (so this may not hold true for much longer). By next shell I mean the one that is supposed to be in Windows Vista.

By Windows I am referring to the standard graphical interface used by Windows (GDI). DirectX is an enhanced graphic interface and GDI (Graphical Device Interface) is the standard interface. DirectX used mostly by games and GDI by application. A game is essentially an application, so by application I mean non-directx programs. Some games use GDI and do not need directx (such as Solitaire) so most but not all games use DirectX. And DirectX is not the only enhanced graphic interface, there is also OpenGL.

However, quality of output is not the same between cards. Such as some have better color output than others. Of course need good quality monitor to see quality output.

Ok, thx.
So there is no absolutely definition, depending on what applications we use and what they need.
By the way, I think having a video card must be better than using onboard chips, despitie not playing games.
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