Video Graphics Array

• 640×480 in 16 colors or monochrome[13][14]
• 640×350 or 640×200 in 16 colors or monochrome (EGA compatibility)
• 320×200 in 256 colors (Mode 13h)
• 320×200 in 4 or 16 colors (CGA compatibility)

The 640×480 16-color and 320×200 256-color modes had fully redefinable palettes, with each entry selected from an 18-bit (262,144-color) gamut.

The other modes defaulted to standard EGA or CGA compatible palettes and instructions, but still permitted remapping of the palette with VGA-specific commands.

As the VGA began to be cloned in great quantities by manufacturers who added ever-increasing capabilities, its 640x480, 16-color mode became the de facto lowest common denominator of graphics cards. By the mid 90s, a 640x480x16 graphics mode using the VGA memory and register specifications was expected by operating systems such as Windows 95 and OS/2 Warp 3.0, which provided no support for lower resolutions or bit depths, or support for other memory or register layouts without additional drivers. Well into the 2000s, even after the VESA standard for graphics cards became commonplace, the "VGA" graphics mode remained a compatibility option for PC operating systems.

Nonstandard display modes can be implemented, with horizontal resolutions of:

• 512 to 800 pixels wide, in 16 colors
• 256 to 400 pixels wide, in 256 colors

And heights of:

• 200, or 350 to 410 lines (including 400-line) at 70 Hz refresh rate, or
• 224 to 256, or 448 to 512 lines (including 240 or 480-line) at 60 Hz refresh rate
• 512 to 600 lines at reduced vertical refresh rates (down to 50 Hz, and including e.g. 528, 544, 552, 560, 576-line), depending on individual monitor compatibility.

For example, high resolution modes with square pixels are available at 768×576 or 704×528 in 16 colors, or medium-low resolution at 320×240 with 256 colors. Alternatively, extended resolution is available with "fat" pixels and 256 colors using, e.g. 400×600 (50 Hz) or 360×480 (60 Hz), and "thin" pixels, 16 colors and the 70 Hz refresh rate with e.g. 736×410 mode.

"Narrow" modes such as 256×224 tend to preserve the same pixel ratio as in e.g. 320×240 mode unless the monitor is adjusted to stretch the image out to fill the screen, as they are derived simply by masking down the wider mode instead of altering pixel or line timings, but can be useful for reducing memory requirements and pixel addressing calculations for arcade game conversions or console emulators.

VGA also implements several text modes:

• 80×25, rendered with a 9×16 pixel font, with an effective resolution of 720×400[15]
• 40×25, with a 9x16 font, with an effective resolution of 360×400
• 80×43 or 80×50, with an 8×8 font grid, with an effective resolution of 640×344 or 640×400 pixels.

As with the pixel-based graphics modes, additional text modes are possible by programming the VGA correctly, with an overall maximum of about 100×80 cells and an active area spanning about 88×64 cells.

One variant that is sometimes seen is 80×30 or 80×60, using an 8×16 or 8×8 font and an effective 640×480 pixel display, which trades use of the more flickery 60 Hz mode for an additional 5 or 10 lines of text and square character blocks (or, at 80×30, square half-blocks).

The intended standard value for the horizontal frequency of VGA's 640x480 mode is exactly double the value used in the NTSC-M video system, as this made it much easier to offer optional TV-out solutions or external VGA-to-TV converter boxes at the time of VGA's development. It is also at least nominally twice that of CGA, which also supported composite monitors.

All derived VGA timings (i.e. those which use the master 25.175 and 28.322 MHz crystals and, to a lesser extent, the nominal 31.469 kHz line rate) can be varied by software that bypasses the VGA firmware interface and communicates directly with the VGA hardware, as many MS-DOS based games did. However, only the standard modes, or modes that at least use almost exactly the same H-sync and V-sync timings as one of the standard modes, can be expected to work with the original late-1980s and early-1990s VGA monitors. The use of other timings may in fact damage such monitors and thus was usually avoided by software publishers.

Third-party "multisync" CRT monitors were more flexible, and in combination with "super EGA", VGA, and later SVGA graphics cards using extended modes, could display a much wider range of resolutions and refresh rates at arbitrary sync frequencies and pixel clock rates.

For the most common VGA mode (640×480, 60 Hz, non-interlaced), the horizontal timings can be found in the HP Super VGA Display Installation Guide and in other places.[19][20]

640×400 @ 70 Hz is traditionally the video mode used for booting VGA-compatible x86 personal computers[21] that show a graphical boot screen, while text-mode boot uses 720×400 @ 70 Hz.

This convention has been eroded in recent years, however, with POST and BIOS screens moving to higher resolutions, taking advantage of EDID data to match the resolution to a connected monitor.

640×480 @ 60 Hz is the default Windows graphics mode (usually with 16 colors),[21] up to Windows 2000. It remains an option in XP and later versions via the boot menu "low resolution video" option and per-application compatibility mode settings, despite Windows now defaulting to 1024x768 and generally not allowing any resolution below 800x600 to be set.

The need for such a low-quality, universally compatible fallback has diminished since the turn of the millennium, as VGA-signalling-standard screens or adaptors unable to show anything beyond the original resolutions have become increasingly rare.

320×200 at 70 Hz was the most common mode for VGA-era PC games.

"Unchaining" the 256 KB VGA memory into four separate "planes" makes VGA's 256 KB of RAM available in 256-color modes. There is a trade-off for extra complexity and performance loss in some types of graphics operations, but this is mitigated by other operations becoming faster in certain situations:

• Single-color polygon filling could be accelerated due to the ability to set four pixels with a single write to the hardware.
• The video adapter could assist in copying video RAM regions, which was sometimes faster than doing this with the relatively slow CPU-to-VGA interface.
• The use of multiple video pages in hardware allowed double buffering, triple buffering or split screens, which, while available in VGA's 320×200 16-color mode, was not possible using stock Mode 13h.
• Most particularly, several higher, arbitrary-resolution display modes were possible, all the way up to the programmable limit of 800×600 with 16 colors (or 400×600 with 256 colors), as well as other custom modes using unusual combinations of horizontal and vertical pixel counts in either color mode.

Software such as Fractint, Xlib and ColoRIX also supported tweaked 256-color modes on standard adaptors using freely-combinable widths of 256, 320, and 360 pixels and heights of 200, 240 and 256 (or 400, 480 and 512) lines, extending still further to 384 or 400 pixel columns and 576 or 600 (or 288, 300). However, 320×240 was the best known and most frequently used, as it offered a standard 40-column resolution and 4:3 aspect ratio with square pixels. "320×240×8" resolution was commonly called Mode X, the name used by Michael Abrash when he presented the resolution in Dr. Dobb's Journal.

The highest resolution modes were only used in special, opt-in cases rather than as standard, especially where high line counts were involved. Standard VGA monitors had a fixed line scan (H-scan) rate – "multisync" monitors being, at the time, expensive exotica – and so the vertical/frame (V-scan) refresh rate had to be reduced in order to accommodate them, which increased visible flicker and thus eye strain. For example, the highest 800×600 mode, being otherwise based on the matching SVGA resolution (with 628 total lines), reduced the refresh rate from 60 Hz to about 50 Hz (and 832×624, the theoretical maximum resolution achievable with 256kb at 16 colors, would have reduced it to about 48 Hz, barely higher than the rate at which XGA monitors employed a double-frequency interlacing technique to mitigate full-frame flicker).

These modes were also outright incompatible with some monitors, producing display problems such as picture detail disappearing into overscan (especially in the horizontal dimension), vertical roll, poor horizontal sync or even a complete lack of picture depending on the exact mode attempted. Due to these potential issues, most VGA tweaks used in commercial products were limited to more standards-compliant, "monitor-safe" combinations, such as 320×240 (square pixels, three video pages, 60 Hz), 320×400 (double resolution, two video pages, 70 Hz), and 360×480 (highest resolution compatible with both standard VGA monitors and cards, one video page, 60 Hz) in 256 colors, or double the H-rez in 16-color mode.

Super VGA (SVGA) is a display standard developed in 1988, when NEC Home Electronics announced its creation of the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA). The development of SVGA was led by NEC, along with other VESA members including ATI Technologies and Western Digital. SVGA enabled graphics display resolutions up to 800×600 pixels, 36% more than VGA's maximum resolution of 640×480 pixels.[26]

Extended Graphics Array (XGA) is an IBM display standard introduced in 1990. Later it became the most common appellation of the 1024 × 768 pixels display resolution.