1. Presentation by David Fong
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 ( 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