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Graphics Cards

Graphics Cards. Presentation by David Fong. What are graphics cards used for?. Animation Gaming – both PC and console Design/Drafting Special effects creation/editing Medical Instruments And other purposes where fast rendering and high resolutions are needed. History.

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Graphics Cards

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  1. Graphics Cards Presentation by David Fong

  2. What are graphics cards used for? • Animation • Gaming – both PC and console • Design/Drafting • Special effects creation/editing • Medical Instruments • And other purposes where fast rendering and high resolutions are needed

  3. History • Over the years, more colors, higher resolution, faster bus interfaces, and more memory.

  4. History • Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) was the first video card created in 1981 – displays green text on black screen • Video Graphics Array (VGA) = very popular and was the standard in almost every PC up until recently • First 3d video cards were released in 1995 and they used SVGA; learned to create 3d effects

  5. Monochrome Monitor

  6. Components • Graphics Processing Unit (GPU): perform calculations for rendering and figure out what to do with each pixel • Video Memory: storing images and information about each pixel • Output: Common outputs include Video Graphics Array (VGA) for CRT monitors, Digital Visual Interface (DVI) for flat panel displays, and Video-in-video-out (ViVo) for television and video cameras

  7. Components • Heat sink and Fan: used to cool the GPU, just like the CPU of a computer having the same cooling instruments • Motherboards: PCI before AGP • Motherboards: Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) compatible popular decade ago; Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI-E) gaining popularity • BIOS chip that stores settings, information about each component of the graphics cards, and can be altered for over-clocking

  8. Picture of Graphics Card

  9. How graphics cards work? • Take data from CPU and figure out what to do with each pixel to create image • Create wire frame using vectors • Fill remaining pixels with color, lighting, and texture • The filling will consider viewpoint • For games and video, the graphics cards has to do the above steps for 30 frames per second

  10. How graphics cards work? • In greater detail: • GPU creates image, stores image with location and color of each pixel in memory • Memory also holds completed images until it’s time to display them (frame buffer) • Digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is connected to memory and translates image into analog signals that is sent through monitor cable and the image is displayed on monitor

  11. Wire image • Draw 12 lines for cube, then fill in • A curve is created by many short lines

  12. 3d Image Development

  13. 3d effect: Mip-Mapping • Pre-calculated images of target image • Target image, may have several copies which is ¼ the size of previous image • Makes rendering faster when the output is moving toward and further away from a target image

  14. 3d effect: Z-buffering • Each pixel is part of a 2d coordinate (x-y coordinates) • Depth is z-coordinate • When a new object that is rendered wants to take a pixel, Z-buffering checks which pixel is closer to the observer, the old pixel or the new pixel based on the z-coordinate • If new pixel is closer, the new pixel is buffered and replaces old pixel

  15. 3d effect: Anti-aliasing • When trying to represent high resolutions signal at lower resolutions. • Smoothes out edges to the human eye by blending of colors

  16. Anti-aliasing

  17. Anti-aliasing

  18. Anti-aliasing

  19. Anti-Aliasing

  20. Anti-Aliasing

  21. Extra Features • ATI and nVidia added enhancements to their GPUs including: • Anti-aliasing which makes smoother edges for 3d objects • Anisotropic filtering: creating crisper images • Dual-monitor support which can increase productivity • TV-tuner

  22. Do you need a graphics card? • If you only surf the web, watch streaming videos, chat, or word processing, the integrated graphics processor on your motherboard is enough. • If you play games or work with 3d graphics, then a graphics card is recommended.

  23. How to judge quality of graphics card? • Most of the time, you can judge the quality of a graphics card by the processor speed and how much memory the card has. • There are some sites that do benchmark tests (www.tomshardware.com) for comparable cards by running graphics intensive games or environments and measuring the frame rate (frames per second) • Higher the frames per second, the smoother the transitions for frames in games and video

  24. Manufacturers • Intel: develop IGPs (integrated graphics processors) • AMD (acquired ATI) develop GPUs • Nvidia also develop GPUs • Different manufacturers take GPUs and other components to assemble video cards; thus creating slight variations of video cards with same GPUs • Video cards are marketed with GPU manufacturer’s brand name • Most popular video brands are the Radeon of ATI and GeForce of Nvidia

  25. IGPs vs Graphic Cards • About 90% of computers use IGPs • IGPs use the memory in the system instead of having dedicated video memory like Graphics Cards • IGPs are way cheaper than Graphics Cards • Performance always favors Graphics Cards • Almost impossible to play high end games on IGPs

  26. How much video memory you need? • Depends on resolution and bits per pixel (how many colors possible for pixel) • 32bpp = 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 colors • Minimum memory = Resolution x bpp • Example: 1024 x 768 x 32 bits per pixel • 25,165,824 bits / (8 bits per byte) • 3,145,728 bytes • So need a little bit more than 3 MB of memory

  27. Future • Because of growing processor speeds, there may be a need to develop a faster way for the CPU to transfer bits to the GPU (like how AGP was needed a decade ago, and PCI-E few years ago) • With greater GPU speeds, comes greater demand for power (a simple PCI-E connection is not enough to power a high quality graphics cards these days, most likely needs additional sockets to be connected for power) • The growth in processor speed and memory will create higher fps at greater resolutions

  28. Twix • How to calculate the minimum amount of video memory you need?

  29. Twix • What was the most popular bus interface before PCI-E?

  30. Twix • How do most benchmark tests measure the performance of a graphics card?

  31. Sources • Howstuffworks.com • Wikipedia.org • Encarta.msn.com • Brighthub.com • Pcwize.com

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