Last time, we talked about the computers hard

disk and RAM.

 25 years
ago
one
colour

Dedicated Video Graphics Cards

 Graphics Card

flight simulator

Ping Pong
 Video
Graphics Array VGA

colour memory resolution

Accelerated Graphics Port

AGP
dedicated graphic cards

CPU more
effectively video graphics card
 Accelerated Graphics Port
AGP 2D 3D graphics

Voodoo 3D FX
 NVIDIA GeForce ATI
Radeon

AMD
ATI

8 GB second

2560 x 1600 pixels

320 x 200 pixels
 Graphics Cards
CPU
wire frame straight lines lighting
texture colour

processor
RAM each pixel
colour location screen RAM

RAM digital-to-analogue
converter RAMDAC
analogue signal

Central
Processing
Units CPU integrated
graphics chip
RAM
processing rendering
slow
 high definition 3D
gaming TV output video editing 3D Computer-Aided Design
multiple monitors better

graphics card
PCI-Express Peripheral
Component Interconnect
*** PCI-Express
slot ONLY
graphics
*** PCI slots

many things
modem sound
network cards
 A modern video graphics card looks like a mini computer.

A. Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

MAIN & ONLY JOB GPU
accelerate graphics
1000 MHz
Believe it or not, but modern GPUs are 3 to 5 times
more powerful than CPUs!!!
Modern GPUs can have over 2,800 cores with more than 7,100 million transistors!
With this kind of power, modern GPUs can calculate and draw over 2 million pixels 60
times every second!

GPUs
CPUs
CPUs GPUs CPUs a
few cores very very quickly
step-by-step GPUs thousands of smaller more efficient
cores multiple tasks a lot slower
same time PARALLEL PROCESSING
 GPUs general purpose GP

GPUs
GPGPU

Video BIOS firmware

basic program

B. Video Memory
memory capacity
8 GB