Graphics Cards and Uses

Iresh Bandara
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

Over the years, more colors, higher resolution, faster bus interfaces, and more memory.
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
Monochrome Monitor
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
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
Picture of Graphics Card
ATI Radeon 295X2 8GB
NVidia GeForce Titan Z
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
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
Wire image

• Draw 12 lines for cube, then fill in

• A curve is created by many short lines
3D Image Development
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
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
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
Anti-aliasing
Anti-aliasing
Anti-aliasing
Anti-aliasing
Anti-aliasing
Tessellation

• Tessellation: The filling of a plane with polygons such that there is

no overlap or gap.
• In computer graphics objects are rendered as a triangular mesh
• A triangle is always a plane
• Thus, the triangles in a mesh can be tessellated to increase detail
Tessellation

• Tessellation is a method of breaking down polygons into finer

pieces. For example, if you take a square and cut it across its
diagonal, you’ve “tessellated” this square into two triangles. By
itself, tessellation does little to improve realism. For example, in
a game, it doesn’t really matter if a square is rendered as two
triangles or two thousand triangles—tessellation only improves
realism if the new triangles are put to use in depicting new
information.
• When a displacement map (left) is applied to a flat surface, the
resulting surface (right) expresses the height information encoded
in the displacement map.
Tessellation

• In the past complex shading models were used to hide lack of

detail in a polygonal mesh
• They can only do so much…
Tessellation

• The solution is to use on-the-card tessellation to increase the

physical detail in the meshes
Why Tessellate?

• In software tessellation provides an interesting way of enhancing

detail
• In hardware tessellation allows a simple mesh to be sent down to
the GPU, converted to a complex mesh, and then displayed
• Decrease memory to the card
• Increase rendering performance by decreasing the number of polygons
through the full pipeline
Tessellation + Displacement Maps

• A highly detailed mesh can be sent to the card as a simple mesh

and a displacement map

• Trades ALU operations for memory bandwidth

• ALUs scale faster than bandwidth
Tessellation + Displacement Maps
Tessellation + Displacement Maps
CUDA

• Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)

•
• CUDA™ is a parallel computing platform and programming model that
enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the
power of the graphics processing unit (GPU).
•
• Using high-level languages, GPU-accelerated applications run the
sequential part of their workload on the CPU – which is optimized for
single-threaded performance – while accelerating parallel processing on
the GPU. This is called "GPU computing."
•
CUDA

• GPU computing is possible because today's GPU does much more than
render graphics; It sizzles with a teraflop of floating point performance
and support application tasks designed for anything from finance to
medicine.

• In the computer game industry, in addition to graphics rendering, GPUs

are used in game physics calculations (physical effects like debris,
smoke, fire, fluids) examples include PhysX and Bullet. CUDA has also
been used to accelerate non-graphical applications in computational
biology, cryptography and other fields by an order of magnitude or
more.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
Question?

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

Question?

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

Question?

• How do most benchmark tests measure the performance of a

graphics card?