Display modes of the adapter card can be categorized either as text/character mode or graphics mode.

Text Mode

In the text mode, the screen is internally represented as text instead of Pixel. The screen is divided into a rectangular grid (cell or referred box), each cell is capable of bold a single character only. All video standards support text mode with 25 rows and 80 columns of characters. Text mode has mono-space fonts, which means each character has an equal width on the screen. So that output can be aligned properly. Screen manipulation in text mode is faster compared to graphics mode and it requires less memory.

Graphics Mode

Graphics mode is a computer display mode that generates an image using pixels. In graphics mode, the screen is internally represented as a grid of pixels. Pixel is the smallest addressable entity on the screen. Everything including characters is represented in terms of pixels. Graphics mode supports smoother shapes and fonts. Graphical objects like a circle, line, triangle etc. cannot be displayed in text mode. As per the requirement, the application programmer can switch between text and graphics modes.

Display Mode

The graphics adapter supports different resolutions, colors and aspect ratios. Detail of various adapters is shown in the below table.

Adapter Acronym	Full form	Resolution	Aspect Ratio	Color Supported
SXGA	Super Extended Graphics Array	1280 x 1024	5:4	224
SVGA	Super Video Graphics Array	800 x 600	4:3	16
VGA	Video Graphics Array	640 x 480	4:3	16
MCGA	Multi-Color Graphics Adapter	320 x 200 640 x 480	4:3 4:3	256 2
EGA	Enhanced Graphics Adapter	640 x 350 640 x 200 320 x 200	4:3 4:3 4:3	16 16 16
Hercules	–	720 x 348	4:3	2
CGA	Color Graphics Adapter	640 x 200 320 x 200 160 x 200	4:3 4:3 4:3	2 4 16

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