Well, If you're a gamer or just someone who has a really nice spec'd out PC you
would have probably already heard the term ''Graphics Card'' and most likely
you know exactly what it is used for.
But how exactly does it work?
What causes the Graphics card to work how it does.
Well, in this video, I'll be talking about just that and I hope you learn something new.
So, why don't we jump into it.
Now before we get into how graphics card work, let's first set up a base as to what a graphics
card is.
Your Computer's graphics card is the component responsible for producing the visual output
from your computer.
Virtually all programs produce visual output; the video card is the piece of hardware that
takes that output and tells the monitor which of the dots on the screen to light up (and
in what colour) to allow you to see it.
Now, The CPU, working in conjunction with software applications, sends information about
the image to the graphics card.
The graphics card decides how to use the pixels on the screen to create the image.
It then sends that information to the monitor through a cable.
Either a classic VGA Cable or a HDMI Cable, but in most cases with newer Cards, People
tend to use HDMI Connectors.
Creating an image out of binary data is a demanding process.
To make a 3-D image, the graphics card first creates a wire frame out of straight lines.
Then, it rasterizes the image (fills in the remaining pixels).
It also adds lighting, texture and color.
For fast-paced games, the computer has to go through this process about sixty times
per second.
Without a graphics card to perform the necessary calculations, the workload would be too much
for the computer to handle.
One of the main things that a graphics card needs is memory.
The memory holds the color of each pixel.
In an extremely simple situation where your display resolution would be 640x480 and you
would have a black and white screen, each pixel may be only black or white, so you need
just 1 bit to store each pixel's color.
Since a byte holds 8 bits, you need (640/8) 80 bytes to store the pixel colors for one
line of pixels on the display.
You need (480 X 80) 38,400 bytes of memory to hold all of the pixels visible on the display.
The second thing a graphics card needs is a way for the computer to change the graphics
card's memory.
This is normally done by connecting the graphics card to the card bus on the motherboard.
The computer can send signals through the bus to alter the memory.
There are situations where your refresh rate is 60 frames per second.
This means that the graphics card scans the entire memory array 1 bit at a time and does
this 60 times per second.
It sends signals to the monitor for each pixel on each line, and then sends a horizontal
sync pulse; it does this repeatedly for all 480 lines, and then sends a vertical sync
pulse.
When a graphics card handles color, it does it in one of two ways.
A true-color card devotes 3 or 4 bytes per pixel (4 bytes allows an extra byte for an
"alpha channel").
On a 1600x1200-pixel display, this adds up to about 8 million bytes of video memory.
The other alternative is to use 1 byte per pixel and then use these bytes to index a
Color Look-Up Table (CLUT).
The CLUT contains 256 entries with 3 or 4 bytes per entry.
A modern card contains its own high-power central processing unit (CPU) that is optimized
for graphics operations.
Depending on the graphics card, this CPU will be either a graphics coprocessor or a graphics
accelerator.
Think of a coprocessor as a co-worker, and an accelerator as an assistant.
The coprocessor and the CPU work simultaneously, while the accelerator receives instructions
from the CPU and carries them out.
In the coprocessor system, the graphics card driver software sends graphics-related tasks
directly to the graphics coprocessor.
The operating system sends everything else to the CPU.
With a graphics accelerator, the driver software sends everything to the computer's CPU.
The CPU then directs the graphics accelerator to perform specific graphics-intensive tasks.
For example, the CPU might say to the accelerator, "Draw a polygon with these three vertices,"
and the accelerator would do the work of painting the pixels of the polygon into video memory.
I could probably go a little bit more in depth but this is meant to be a somewhat simple
video to people who are curious as to how a normal computer graphics card would work.
So, thanks for watching.
If you like the video, learnt anything new or want more feel free to subscribe, comment
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Also, feel free to check out previous tech tips videos where you can learn some cool
new stuff by clicking the links provided in the description below.
Once again, thanks for watching and I'll be seeing you in the next video.
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