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What To Look For
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Already know what a Video Card is and what to look for?  Then skip to the Recommendations. 

What To Look For:

• There are so many different things to look for in video cards these days, and I certainly can't cover them all.  I will discuss a few of them though.  First, there are many different 3D features such as bump mapping, hardware T&L (texture & lighting), Z buffers, FSAA (anti-aliasing - reduces jagged edges), anisotropic filtering (improves detail on textures), etc.  The last two are the biggest issues right now.  They can dramatically improve the visual quality of games, but always at the expense of speed (which is generally measured in the number of FPS [frames per second]).  A low FPS would cause the game to be jerky instead of smooth (and thus more difficult to play). Higher resolutions (i.e. 1280x1024 instead of 640x480) also significantly improve the video quality, but at the expense of speed.  It's nice to be able to play games at 1024x768 or higher with 4x FSAA and 4x anisotropic filtering (or better). 4x in the previous number just means the number of passes to render the anti-aliasing and filtering.  The more passes, the better the quality. Confused yet?  :)
• AGP or PCI video cards used to be a question, but now pretty much everyone buys AGP video cards.
• The chipset is what controls the video card's operation and does all the calculations (much like the CPU does for the entire computer). The latest chipsets are designed to do both 2D and 3D applications.  The best chipsets currently come from NVIDIA and ATI.  Other companies include S3, Matrox, Number 9, etc. The chipset is the most important part of the video card, and the faster, more advanced chipsets will clearly be the better choice.  The first decision you should make is which chipset you want to use. This will primarily be dictated by price and the level of performance you're looking for.  Video cards have become the most or second most expensive component in a computer (CPUs can cost more).
• Amount of memory on the card is also important.  It can affect the speed of operation as well as the number of colors and resolution size that can be used in games. I would suggest 128 MB for a video card that will be used for gaming.  32 MB is really sufficient for 2D desktop applications though. AGP video cards can also use system memory but that can slow things down, so it's better to have plenty of RAM on your video card.  The type of memory is also important. DDR SDRAM is about twice as fast as regular SDRAM, and DDR II is even faster than that (DDR stands for double data rate).
• Also pay attention to the supported resolutions, refresh rate, and color depth. These are important if you want to run at very high resolutions with a large number of colors. For most home desktop computers, all current video cards will be sufficient in all these aspects. Refresh rate determines how fast the video card can refresh (redraw on the screen) your display.  The higher the better.  Pay attention to what the max refresh rate are at the higher resolutions.  A 60 Hz refresh rate is too low and will cause noticable flicker on your monitor.  85 or 100 Hz is an ideal refresh rate (easier on the eyes), but 75 Hz may be sufficient for you. Make sure your monitor supports these resolutions and refresh rates as well.
• Some other things to consider are TV-Out, TV-In, video capture capabilities, the speed of the RAM DAC, particular 3D effects that are supported (such as hardware transform and lighting effect), the quality of the cooling fan included (and noise produced by it), and what software bundle the video card comes with since you can often get some good free games through the bundle.

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