Excellent to see this. Perhaps I can refer people to this article rather than writing up/Ctrl+V'ing a good-sized post when somebody needs an explanation on some site or other.
Just a few comments, though. First, I would've appreciated if in addition to showing what each sort of connection interface looks like on a card, you also showed what the appropriate slot looks like on the motherboard; with a lot of people looking for new video cards, even on older systems, I've found it's important to be able to help people tell apart AGP, PCI-e, and plain ol' PCI slots. (also, I saw a lack of mentioning for VESA in the slots; nit-picking, I know. :tongue: )
Oh, and when it refers to the auxiliary power connections for later AGP cards, I'm left a little confused by the "dual 4 pin power sockets," which, in contrast to the words that follow it, implies that lots of cards had multiple power sockets, when indeed, the 6800ultra was the only AGP card that had more than one power connector on it.
But aside from that, great article! I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that this might be among the harbingers of a return of THG's Graphics/Display section to being something other than a poor joke.
Hello , I read the article even though i know my share of knowledge when it comes to graphical cards , its always great to have an amazing article refresh everything up.
I have a question , and I'm not sure if this is the right place..If not id appreciate it if you can point me to the right place for such questions
Tom said that the Vram of a card stores mostly textures to feed the gpu , ive always wondered What exactly does the memory do? , ive read in articles that having a faster vram helps in rendering shadows and raster operations..also having a larger size helps when increasing resolution..
But what exactly does memory do when it comes to help increasing performance IE: when the speed increases..whats being fed faster? the textures? geometric information?
Any answer is greatly appreciated !
VRAM performs three primary functions (or what it stores):
- [*:78c0555a4e]It acts as the PC's "frame buffer." Anything that's displayed on a screen attached to the PC (be it analog OR digital) is stored in this buffer. If multiple independent displays are used, there will be more than one frame buffer in the VRAM.
[*:78c0555a4e]In more advanced 3D games (pretty much all of them today) it acts as a "redering buffer." It's like a frame-buffer, but it's to here that shaders, calculations, etc. that are performed by the GPU are written. Ostensibly, eveything written here will find its way, in some shape or form, into the final frame buffer.
[*:78c0555a4e]Lastly, VRAM is used for holding texture-maps. Simply put, they're image data bits that can be used in various ways; most commonly, it's a "color-map" that might look like an ordinary image, that is then applied to the 3D meshes to turn an invisible "wireframe" into the models you see. Some shaders, such as bump-mapping, normal-mapping, paralax-mapping, and specular-mapping, rely on texture-maps as well, though they technically aren't images; the map, for, say, bump-mapping or paralax-mapping, is more of a "height-map" that tells how elevated that pixel should be.Of course, other things can be stored to; I believe most software also does use it to store geometric data that's not being calculated at the time, though the space for that would be negligable. (geometric data actually being worked with will be stored within cache and registers within the GPU itself)
At any rate, faster memory (faster in bandwidth, not clock speed) means that the GPU can read/write to it faster, and hence more quickly access and modify what's stored there. The result: faster calculations overall. This is especially important when, say, you're rendering (or playing) something in a rather high resolution; the higher the resolution, the more pixels there are to write to, and hence, far more bandwidth used/needed.
I hope this cleared some things up.
Sweet dude, been wondering when you'd get this out.
BTW, just curious, why is this thread in the 'memory' section instead of 'graphics'?
Just curious, because wondered why I hadn't seen it earlier.
Cheers! :trophy:
It appears that a LOT of major threads are winding up in the "Memory" section. Perhaps an internal joke on someone's capabilities?! :lol:
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