How Video Cards Work

http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/HowVideoCardsWork

by macco • 16 years ago

64 7 16 years ago

acabal• 16 years ago

Whenever I read about the guts of video hardware or 3-d game programming it always amazes me that this kind of stuff even exists. It's so complex!

sparky3• 16 years ago

3D graphics is also my favorite success story for programming abstractions. This code:

  glColor3f(1.0, 0.0, 0.0);
  glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES);
    glVertex3f (-1.0, -1.0, 0.0);
    glVertex3f (1.0, -1.0, 0.0);
    glVertex3f (0.0, 1.0, 0.0);
  glEnd();

Has been able to draw a red triangle for almost 20 years, on nearly every GPU released from a few dozen vendors. It transparently gets faster without you having to do much.

As a result of everyone having to writing code like the above, as opposed to assembly code specific to each GPU, the GPU vendors have been able to change their architecture tremendously over the years to adapt to changing process technology tradeoffs and add new features.

They've been able to do this in part because 3D graphics is a well-enough-defined domain and can be reasonably API-ified, but I could easily see things having gone a different way; people would be arguing about whether the ARM of GPUs would conquer the x86 of GPUs, given the massive install base of the incumbent. Instead, to some extent, anyone who can write an OpenGL compiler can play.

emarcotte• 16 years ago

On the other hand, that same path has shown to be quite problematic, right? Lets say you have 10000 verticies, that's 10000 function calls to make. Sure, you could precompile a display list, or use some other work around, but we've finally come to the point where it is not fast enough anymore. Welcome to opengl 4, i'll miss the easy to understand glBegin blocks.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

It helps a lot that for the entire history of video cards, said cards pretty much all share the same goal- rendering a 3D object.

It can be argued that all a CPU does is crunch numbers, but if you spend much time with a limited processor, you quickly realize a good CPU (or in my case MCU) needs to be very versatile and flexible.

Jabbles• 16 years ago

An interesting aside:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_doma...

How Video Cards Work

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