Penguin

An Acronym for Extended Graphics Array.

The graphics hardware standard intended by IBM to supersede VGA. It adds resolutions up to 1024x768 pixels in 256 colours, 4:3 aspect ratio). However, it was built for the MCA bus which never caught on, and required special drivers to use as more than a plain VGA card, so XGA never became successful. The market was won over by a slew of incompatible SVGA designs instead.


The acronym was later recycled by MarkeTroids to mean a maximum resolution support of 1024x768 pixels in LCD displays and computer video projectors. Technically, they have nothing to do with XGA. This was then bastardized further as maximum resolutions grew. A list of seen acronyms, sorted by resolution:

|v^ Acronym |v^ Expansion ||^ Pixel
resolution
|v^ Aspect
ratio
|> Horiz |> Vert |< XGA |< XGA (duh..) |> 1024 |> 768 |> 1.33:1 |< SXGA |< Super XGA |> 1280 |> 1024 |> 1.25:1 |< WXGA |< Wide XGA |> 1366 |> 768 |> 1.78:1 |< SXGA+ |< Super XGA Plus |> 1400 |> 1050 |> 1.33:1 |< UXGA |< Ultra XGA |> 1600 |> 1200 |> 1.33:1 |< WSXGA+ |< Wide Super XGA Plus |> 1680 |> 1050 |> 1.60:1 |< QXGA |< Quad XGA |> 2048 |> 1536 |> 1.33:1 |< QSXGA |< Quad Super XGA |> 2560 |> 2048 |> 1.25:1 |< QUXGA |< Quad Ultra XGA |> 3200 |> 2400 |> 1.33:1 |< QUXGA-W |< Quad Ultra XGA Wide |> 3840 |> 2400 |> 1.60:1

This list should not be considered exhaustive; you can combine "Super", "Wide", "Quad", "Ultra", and "Plus" in many more ways than shown. Some MarkeTroid somewhere is sooner or later bound to.