SVGA

Super VGA is really a broad category of video standards, as it encompasses everything from the initial days of SVGA all the way to video cards of today and their capabilities. The broad range of cards and capabilities under this umbrella led to the use of video drivers (something that was not needed before). These video drivers come on a diskette or CD with the video card and, when installed, act as a kind of translator to tell your operating system and software how to use the specific video card you had. Only with correctly installed drivers will your computer be able to operate your video card as it is supposed to be run, at the capabilties it can deliver.

SVGA is much more advanced than VGA. In most cases, one SVGA card can produce millions of colors at a choice of resolutions. But, the abilities depend on the card and the manufacturer. Since SVGA is a loose term created by several companies, there is no actual standard to SVGA.

In order to create some standard out of the chaos of SVGA, the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) introduced a SVGA standard. This SVGA standard did not deal with certain methods of implementation of capabilities, but, instead, defined a standard interface called the VESA BIOS Extension. This provided programmers with one common interface to write for instead of trying to tailor their programs to work with several different SVGA cards, all different. All SVGA cards in use today comply to the VESA standard. At first, the VESA SVGA standard was criticized, and manufacturers were slow to integrate it. At first, they distributed the extension as a program to be loaded each and every time you booted the computer. Finally, though, manufacturers integrated the extension as a part of their SVGA BIOS.

Conclusion

That pretty much brings us up to date from the early days of strict video standards to today’s loose SVGA category which we are all so used to. There are many other proprietary video standards that came out along the way that were not mentioned here. I have mentioned the most common ones, but if you require information on these less common standards, I encourage you to search the internet further.