information of graphic cards

1. Graphics Cards
Presented by
Poornima . R . shetagar

2. WHAT ARE GRAPHICS CARDS?
A Graphics Card is a piece of
computer hardware that produces
the image you see on a monitor.
TheGraphics Card is responsible
for rendering an image to your
monitor, it does this by converting
data into a signal your monitor can
understand.

3. 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

4. HISTORY
Over the years, more colors, higher resolution,
faster bus interfaces, and more memory.

5. 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

6. HISTORY
 In 1983 Intel made the iSBX 275 Video Graphics
Controller Multimodule Board for industrial
systems based on the Multibus standard.
 Released in 1985, the Commodore Amiga was
of first personal computers to come standard
with a GPU
 Nvidia was first to produce a chip capable of
programmable shading, GeForce 3(code
named NV20) .

7. MONOCHROME MONITOR

8. S3 VIRGE

9. What is GPU??
• A GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNIT or GPU
is a
specialized microprocessor that discharge and
accelerates 3D or 2D graphics.
• Used in embedded systems, mobile
phones, personal computers, workstations
and game consoles.

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. CPU v/s GPU

15. WIRE IMAGE
Draw 12 lines for cube, then fill in
A curve is created by many short
lines

16. Sample image

17. 3D IMAGE DEVELOPMENT

18. 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

19. 3D EFFECT: MIP-
MAPPING

20. 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

21. 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.

23. ANTI-ALIASING

24. ANTI-ALIASING

25. ANTI-ALIASING

26. ANTI-ALIASING

27. 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

28. 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.

29. 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

30. 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

36. 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

37. 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

38. 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.

39. SOURCES
Howstuffworks.com
Wikipedia.org
Encarta.msn.com
Brighthub.com
Pcwize.com
https://mygaming.co.za

40. THANK
YOU