Shopping on line can be easy, simple and save you lots of money. It can also take a lot of your time, frustrate you, and result in unwanted purchases. Now the same can be said for regular high street shopping, but with the vast opportunity presented by the Internet it will pay you to spend a few minutes reading this and understanding how to better optimize your Graphics Processing Unit shopping experience:
1. Compare - without doubt the biggest advantage that the Graphics Processing Unit offers shoppers today is the ability to compare thousands of Graphics Processing Unit at a time. This is a great thing, but not necessarily all the time! Too much can be daunting at times so take advantage of the great comparison sites and where possible let them do the hard work for you.
2. Research - if it has been said it will be on the internet. Ignorance is no longer a justifiable reason for buying the wrong thing. Take the time to research in detail everything that you could possible want to know about
3. Testimonials - don't know anybody that has bought a Graphics Processing Unit? Wrong! If the Graphics Processing Unit is good the internet will let you know. Use the Internet as a friend and get testimonials before you buy.
4. Questions - Got a question about Graphics Processing Unit then search the Forums, FAQ's, Blogs etc. Don't be afraid to ask .....
5. Reputation - Never heard of the company selling Graphics Processing Unit? Don't worry, no reason why you should know every company in the world, but you know someone that does! Use the internet to find out what people are saying about Graphics Processing Unit and build up a picture of their reputation for sales, returns, customer service, delivery etc.
6. Returns - still worried that even after all of the above your Graphics Processing Unit wont be what you want? Check out the returns policy. There is so much competition now that someone, somewhere is bound to offer the terms that you are comfortable with.
7. Feedback - happy with your Graphics Processing Unit then let people know, after all you are depending on others people input in your buying decision, so why not give a little back.
8. Security - check for the yellow padlock on the Graphics Processing Unit site before you buy, and the s after http:/ /i.e. https:// = a secure site
9. Contact - got a question about Graphics Processing Unit, or want to leave a comment then check out the sites contact page. Reputable companies have them and respond.
10. Payment - ready to pay for your Graphics Processing Unit, then use your credit card or PayPal! Be aware of companies that don't accept them, there may be genuine reasons but given the huge amount of choice you have when buying online there is no reason at all not to buy via credit card or PayPal.
A
graphics processing unit or
GPU (also occasionally called
visual processing unit or
VPU) is a dedicated graphics rendering device for a personal computer, workstation, or game console. Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics, and their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than typical Central processing unit for a range of complex
algorithms. A GPU can sit on top of a
video card, or it can be integrated directly into the motherboard in more than 90% of desktop and notebook computers (although integrated GPUs are usually far less powerful than their add-in counterparts).
Graphics Accelerator
A graphics accelerator incorporates custom microchips which contain special mathematical operations commonly used in graphics rendering. The efficiency of the microchips therefore determines the effectiveness of the graphics accelerator. They are mainly used for playing 3D games or high-end 3D rendering.
A GPU implements a number of graphics Primitive (geometry) operations in a way that makes running them much faster than drawing directly to the screen with the host CPU. The most common operations for early 2D computer graphics include the
BitBLT operation (combines several
bitmap patterns using a
RasterOp), usually in special hardware called a
"blitter", and operations for drawing rectangles, triangles, circles, and
Arc (geometry)s. Modern GPUs also have support for 3D computer graphics, and typically include digital video-related functions.
History
Early 1980s
Modern GPUs are descended from the monolithic graphic Integrated circuit of the early 1980s and 1990s. These chips had limited
BitBLT support in the form of
Sprite (computer science)s (if they had BitBLT support at all), and usually had no shape-drawing support. Some GPUs could run several operations in a display list, and could use direct memory access to reduce the load on the host processor; an early example was the ANTIC co-processor used in the
Atari 800 and
Atari 5200. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, high-speed, general-purpose
microprocessors became popular for implementing high-end GPUs. Several high-end graphics
Expansion card for PCs and computer workstations used
Texas Instruments's TMS340 series (a 32-bit CPU optimized for graphics applications, with a frame buffer controller on-chip) to implement fast drawing functions; these were especially popular for CAD applications. Also, many laser printers from Apple shipped with a PostScript
raster image processor (a special case of a GPU) running on a Motorola 68000-series CPU, or a faster RISC CPU like the AMD 29000 or
Intel i960. A few very specialised applications used digital signal processors for 3D support, such as
Atari Games' Hard Drivin' and
Race Drivin' games.
As chip process technology improved, it eventually became possible to move drawing and BitBLT functions onto the same board (and, eventually, into the same chip) as a regular frame buffer controller such as
Video Graphics Array. These cut-down "2D accelerators" were not as flexible as microprocessor-based GPUs, but were much easier to make and sell.
1980s
The
Commodore Amiga was the first mass-market computer to include a
blitter in its video hardware, and IBM's
8514 (display standard) graphics system was one of the first PC video cards to implement 2D primitives in hardware.
The Amiga was unique, for the time, in that it featured what would now be recognized as a full graphics accelerator, offloading practically all video generation functions to hardware, including line drawing, area fill, block image transfer, and a graphics coprocessor with its own (though primitive) instruction set. Prior (and quite some time after on most systems) a general purpose CPU had to handle every aspect of drawing the display.
1990s
Tseng Labs ET4000 S3 ViRGE Voodoo3By the early 1990s, the rise of
Microsoft Windows sparked a surge of interest in high-speed, high-resolution 2D Raster graphics (which had previously been the domain of Unix workstations and the
Apple Macintosh). For the PC market, the dominance of Windows meant PC graphics vendors could now focus development effort on a single programming interface,
Graphics Device Interface (GDI).
In 1991, S3 Graphics introduced the first single-chip 2D accelerator, the
S3 Graphics (which its designers named after the
Porsche 911 as an indication of the speed increase it promised). The 86C911 spawned a host of imitators: by 1995, all major PC graphics chip makers had added 2D acceleration support to their chips. By this time, fixed-function
Windows accelerators had surpassed expensive general-purpose graphics coprocessors in Windows performance, and these coprocessors faded away from the PC market.
Throughout the 1990s, 2D GUI acceleration continued to evolve. As manufacturing capabilities improved, so did the level of integration of graphics chips. Video acceleration became popular as standards such as
Video CD and DVD arrived, and the
Internet grew in popularity and speed. Additional
application programming interfaces (APIs) arrived for a variety of tasks, such as Microsoft's
WinG graphics library for
Windows 3.x, and their later
DirectDraw interface for hardware acceleration of 2D games within
Windows 95 and later.
In the early and mid-1990s,
CPU-assisted real-time 3D graphics were becoming increasingly common in computer and console games, which lead to an increasing public demand for 3D acceleration. Early examples of mass-marketed 3D graphics hardware can be found in
History of video game consoles (fifth generation) such as
PlayStation and
Nintendo 64. In the PC world, notable failed first-tries for low-cost 3D graphics chips were the
S3 Graphics ViRGE, ATI Technologies
Rage, and
Matrox Mystique. These chips were essentially previous-generation 2D accelerators with 3D features bolted on. Many were even
Pin-compatibility with the earlier-generation chips for ease of implementation and minimal cost. Initially, performance 3D graphics were possible only with separate add-on boards dedicated to accelerating 3D functions (and lacking 2D GUI acceleration entirely) such as the 3dfx
Voodoo. However, as manufacturing technology again progressed, video, 2D GUI acceleration, and 3D functionality were all integrated into one chip.
Rendition (company) Verite chipsets were the first to do this well enough to be worthy of note.
As
DirectX advanced steadily from a rudimentary (and perhaps tedious) API for game programming to become one of the leading 3D graphics programming interfaces, 3D accelerators evolved seemingly exponentially as years passed.
Direct3D 5.0 was the first version of the wikt:burgeoning API to really dominate the gaming market and stomp out many of the hardware-specific interfaces. Direct3D 7.0 introduced support for hardware-accelerated
transform and lighting (T&L). 3D accelerators moved beyond of being just simple rasterizers to add another significant hardware stage to the 3D rendering pipeline. The NVIDIA
GeForce 256 (also known as NV10) was the first card on the market with this capability. Hardware transform and lighting set the precedent for later pixel shader and vertex shader units which were far more flexible and programmable.
2000 to present
GPUWith the advent of the
DirectX 8.0 API and similar functionality in OpenGL, GPUs added programmable
Pixel shader to their capabilities. Each pixel could now be processed by a short program that could include additional image textures as inputs, and each geometric vertex could likewise be processed by a short program before it was projected onto the screen. NVIDIA was first to produce a chip capable of programmable shading, the
GeForce 3 (core named NV20). By October 2002, with the introduction of the ATI Technologies
Radeon 9700 core (also known as R300), the world's first Direct3D 9.0 accelerator, pixel and vertex shaders could implement Control flow#Loops and lengthy
floating point math, and in general were quickly becoming as flexible as CPUs, and orders of magnitude faster for image-array operations. Pixel shading is often used for things like bump mapping, which adds texture, to either make an object look shiny, dull, rough, or even round or extruded.
Today, Parallel computing GPUs have begun making computational inroads against the CPU, and a subfield of research, dubbed
GPGPU for
General Purpose Computing on GPU, has found its way into fields as diverse as oil exploration, scientific
image processing, and even
stock options pricing determination. There is increased pressure on GPU manufacturers from "GPGPU users" to improve hardware design, usually focusing on adding more flexibility to the programming model.
GPU companies
There have been many companies producing GPUs over the years, under numerous brand names. The current dominators of the market are
AMD (manufacturers of the ATI Radeon graphics chip line) and NVIDIA (manufacturers of the
NVIDIA Geforce graphics chip line.)
Intel also produce GPUs that are built into their motherboards, such as the 915 and 945. These chips are often less than optimum for playing 3D games, and fixes often have to be applied. Although most games will play on the Intel chips (except for the few that are specifically coded not to run on it), frame rates will often become unplayable, even at the lowest settings. The 965 chipset is marginally faster, and finally includes hardware T&L, but the integrated nature of the chipset still gives a large performance hit.
Computational functions
Modern GPUs use most of their transistors to do calculations related to
3D computer graphics. They were initially used to accelerate the memory-intensive work of
texture mapping and
rendering polygons, later adding units to accelerate geometry calculations such as Translation (geometry)
vertex (geometry) into different
coordinate systems. Recent developments in GPUs include support for
programmable shaders which can manipulate vertices and textures with many of the same operations supported by
Central processing unit,
oversampling and interpolation techniques to reduce aliasing, and very high-precision color spaces. Because most of these computations involve
Matrix (mathematics) and
Vector calculus operations, engineers and scientists have increasingly studied the use of GPUs for non-graphical calculations.
In addition to the 3D hardware, today's GPUs include basic 2D acceleration and frame buffer capabilities (usually with a VGA compatibility mode). In addition, most GPUs made since 1995 support the YUV
color space and hardware overlays (important for
digital video playback), and many GPUs made since 2000 support
MPEG primitives such as
motion compensation and inverse discrete cosine transform. Recent graphics cards even decode high-definition video on the card, taking some load off the central processing unit.
GPU forms
Dedicated graphics cards
The most powerful class of GPUs typically interface with the
motherboard by means of an
expansion slot such as
PCI Express (PCIe) or
Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) and can usually be replaced or upgraded with relative ease, assuming the motherboard is capable of supporting the upgrade. A few graphics cards still use Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) slots, but their bandwidth is so limited that they are generally used only when a PCIe or AGP slot is unavailable.
A dedicated GPU is not necessarily removable, nor does it necessarily interface with the motherboard in a standard fashion. The term "dedicated" refers to the fact that dedicated graphics cards have
RAM that is dedicated to the card's use, not to the fact that
most dedicated GPUs are removable. Dedicated GPUs for portable computers are most commonly interfaced through a non-standard and often proprietary slot due to size and weight constraints. Such ports may still be considered PCIe or AGP in terms of their logical host interface, even if they are not physically interchangeable with their counterparts.
Multiple cards can draw together a single image, so that the number of pixels can be doubled and antialiasing can be set to higher quality. If the screen is parted into a left and right, each card can cache the textures and geometry from their side (See Scalable Link Interface (SLI) and
ATI CrossFire).
Integrated graphics solutions
X3000 IGP (under heatsink)
Integrated graphics solutions, or
shared graphics solutions are graphics processors that utilize a portion of a computer's system RAM rather than dedicated graphics memory. Such solutions are less expensive to implement than dedicated graphics solutions, but at a trade-off of being less capable. Historically, integrated solutions were often considered unfit to play 3D games or run graphically intensive programs such as Adobe Flash. (Examples of such IGPs would be offerings from SiS and VIA circa 2004.) However, todays integrated solutions such as the Intel's Intel GMA (Intel G965), AMD's Radeon X1250 (
AMD 690G) and NVIDIA's GeForce 7050 PV (nForce 600) are more than capable of handling 2D graphics from Adobe Flash or low stress 3D graphics. Of course the aforementioned GPUs still struggle with high-end video games. Modern desktop motherboards often include an integrated graphics solution and have expansion slots available to add a dedicated graphics card later.
As a GPU is extremely memory intensive, an integrated solution finds itself competing for the already slow system RAM with the CPU as it has no dedicated video memory. System RAM may be 2 GB/s to 12.8 GB/s, yet dedicated GPUs enjoy between 10 GB/s and 160 GB/s of bandwidth depending on the model.
Older integrated graphics chipsets lacked hardware transform and lighting, but newer ones include it.
Hybrid solutions
This newer class of GPUs competes with integrated graphics in the low-end PC and notebook markets. The most common implementations of this are ATi's HyperMemory and NVIDIA's
TurboCache. Hybrid graphics cards are somewhat more expensive than integrated graphics, but much less expensive than dedicated graphics cards. These also share memory with the system memory, but have a smaller amount of memory on-board than discrete graphics cards do to make up for the high latency of the system RAM. Technologies within PCI Express can make this possible. While these solutions are sometimes advertised as having as much as 768MB of RAM, this refers to how much can be shared with the system memory.
Stream processing/GPGPU
A new concept application for GPUs is that of stream processing and the
GPGPU. This concept turns the massive
floating-point computational power of a modern graphics accelerator's shader pipeline into general-purpose computing power, as opposed to being dedicated solely to graphical operations. In certain applications requiring massive vector operations, this can yield several orders of magnitude higher performance than a conventional CPU. The two largest discrete GPU designers, ATI Technologies and NVIDIA, are beginning to pursue this new market with an array of applications. ATI has teamed with
Stanford University to create a GPU-based client for its Folding@Home distributed computing project that in certain circumstances yields results forty times faster than the conventional CPUs traditionally used in such applications.
See also
References
External links
- NVIDIA - What is a GPU?
- The GPU Gems book series
- Toms Hardware GPU beginners' Guide
- General-Purpose Computation Using Graphics Hardware
- How GPUs work
A
graphics processing unit or
GPU (also occasionally called
visual processing unit or
VPU) is a dedicated graphics rendering device for a
personal computer, workstation, or game console. Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics, and their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than typical Central processing unit for a range of complex
algorithms. A GPU can sit on top of a video card, or it can be integrated directly into the motherboard in more than 90% of desktop and notebook computers (although integrated GPUs are usually far less powerful than their add-in counterparts).
Graphics Accelerator
A graphics accelerator incorporates custom microchips which contain special mathematical operations commonly used in graphics rendering. The efficiency of the microchips therefore determines the effectiveness of the graphics accelerator. They are mainly used for playing 3D games or high-end 3D rendering.
A GPU implements a number of graphics
Primitive (geometry) operations in a way that makes running them much faster than drawing directly to the screen with the host CPU. The most common operations for early 2D computer graphics include the
BitBLT operation (combines several bitmap patterns using a RasterOp), usually in special hardware called a
"blitter", and operations for drawing
rectangles,
triangles, circles, and
Arc (geometry)s. Modern GPUs also have support for
3D computer graphics, and typically include
digital video-related functions.
History
Early 1980s
Modern GPUs are descended from the
monolithic graphic Integrated circuit of the early 1980s and 1990s. These chips had limited BitBLT support in the form of Sprite (computer science)s (if they had BitBLT support at all), and usually had no shape-drawing support. Some GPUs could run several operations in a display list, and could use
direct memory access to reduce the load on the host processor; an early example was the ANTIC co-processor used in the
Atari 800 and Atari 5200. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, high-speed, general-purpose
microprocessors became popular for implementing high-end GPUs. Several high-end graphics
Expansion card for PCs and computer workstations used
Texas Instruments's TMS340 series (a 32-bit CPU optimized for graphics applications, with a frame buffer controller on-chip) to implement fast drawing functions; these were especially popular for CAD applications. Also, many
laser printers from Apple shipped with a PostScript raster image processor (a special case of a GPU) running on a
Motorola 68000-series CPU, or a faster
RISC CPU like the
AMD 29000 or Intel i960. A few very specialised applications used
digital signal processors for 3D support, such as
Atari Games'
Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin' games.
As chip process technology improved, it eventually became possible to move drawing and BitBLT functions onto the same board (and, eventually, into the same chip) as a regular frame buffer controller such as Video Graphics Array. These cut-down "2D accelerators" were not as flexible as microprocessor-based GPUs, but were much easier to make and sell.
1980s
The Commodore Amiga was the first mass-market computer to include a blitter in its video hardware, and IBM's 8514 (display standard) graphics system was one of the first PC video cards to implement 2D primitives in hardware.
The Amiga was unique, for the time, in that it featured what would now be recognized as a full graphics accelerator, offloading practically all video generation functions to hardware, including line drawing, area fill, block image transfer, and a graphics coprocessor with its own (though primitive) instruction set. Prior (and quite some time after on most systems) a general purpose CPU had to handle every aspect of drawing the display.
1990s
Tseng Labs ET4000 S3 ViRGE Voodoo3By the early 1990s, the rise of
Microsoft Windows sparked a surge of interest in high-speed, high-resolution 2D Raster graphics (which had previously been the domain of Unix workstations and the Apple Macintosh). For the PC market, the dominance of Windows meant PC graphics vendors could now focus development effort on a single programming interface, Graphics Device Interface (GDI).
In 1991, S3 Graphics introduced the first single-chip 2D accelerator, the
S3 Graphics (which its designers named after the
Porsche 911 as an indication of the speed increase it promised). The 86C911 spawned a host of imitators: by 1995, all major PC graphics chip makers had added 2D acceleration support to their chips. By this time, fixed-function
Windows accelerators had surpassed expensive general-purpose graphics coprocessors in Windows performance, and these coprocessors faded away from the PC market.
Throughout the 1990s, 2D GUI acceleration continued to evolve. As manufacturing capabilities improved, so did the level of integration of graphics chips. Video acceleration became popular as standards such as Video CD and DVD arrived, and the Internet grew in popularity and speed. Additional application programming interfaces (APIs) arrived for a variety of tasks, such as Microsoft's WinG graphics library for Windows 3.x, and their later DirectDraw interface for hardware acceleration of 2D games within Windows 95 and later.
In the early and mid-1990s,
CPU-assisted real-time 3D graphics were becoming increasingly common in computer and console games, which lead to an increasing public demand for 3D acceleration. Early examples of mass-marketed 3D graphics hardware can be found in History of video game consoles (fifth generation) such as PlayStation and
Nintendo 64. In the PC world, notable failed first-tries for low-cost 3D graphics chips were the S3 Graphics
ViRGE, ATI Technologies
Rage, and
Matrox Mystique. These chips were essentially previous-generation 2D accelerators with 3D features bolted on. Many were even
Pin-compatibility with the earlier-generation chips for ease of implementation and minimal cost. Initially, performance 3D graphics were possible only with separate add-on boards dedicated to accelerating 3D functions (and lacking 2D GUI acceleration entirely) such as the
3dfx Voodoo. However, as manufacturing technology again progressed, video, 2D GUI acceleration, and 3D functionality were all integrated into one chip.
Rendition (company) Verite chipsets were the first to do this well enough to be worthy of note.
As
DirectX advanced steadily from a rudimentary (and perhaps tedious) API for game programming to become one of the leading 3D graphics programming interfaces, 3D accelerators evolved seemingly exponentially as years passed.
Direct3D 5.0 was the first version of the
wikt:burgeoning API to really dominate the gaming market and stomp out many of the hardware-specific interfaces. Direct3D 7.0 introduced support for hardware-accelerated transform and lighting (T&L). 3D accelerators moved beyond of being just simple rasterizers to add another significant hardware stage to the 3D rendering pipeline. The
NVIDIA GeForce 256 (also known as NV10) was the first card on the market with this capability. Hardware transform and lighting set the precedent for later pixel shader and vertex shader units which were far more flexible and programmable.
2000 to present
GPUWith the advent of the DirectX 8.0 API and similar functionality in
OpenGL, GPUs added programmable
Pixel shader to their capabilities. Each pixel could now be processed by a short program that could include additional image textures as inputs, and each geometric vertex could likewise be processed by a short program before it was projected onto the screen. NVIDIA was first to produce a chip capable of programmable shading, the
GeForce 3 (core named NV20). By October 2002, with the introduction of the
ATI Technologies Radeon 9700 core (also known as R300), the world's first Direct3D 9.0 accelerator, pixel and vertex shaders could implement
Control flow#Loops and lengthy floating point math, and in general were quickly becoming as flexible as CPUs, and orders of magnitude faster for image-array operations. Pixel shading is often used for things like bump mapping, which adds texture, to either make an object look shiny, dull, rough, or even round or extruded.
Today, Parallel computing GPUs have begun making computational inroads against the CPU, and a subfield of research, dubbed GPGPU for
General Purpose Computing on GPU, has found its way into fields as diverse as oil exploration, scientific
image processing, and even stock options pricing determination. There is increased pressure on GPU manufacturers from "GPGPU users" to improve hardware design, usually focusing on adding more flexibility to the programming model.
GPU companies
There have been many companies producing GPUs over the years, under numerous brand names. The current dominators of the market are
AMD (manufacturers of the
ATI Radeon graphics chip line) and NVIDIA (manufacturers of the NVIDIA Geforce graphics chip line.)
Intel also produce GPUs that are built into their motherboards, such as the 915 and 945. These chips are often less than optimum for playing 3D games, and fixes often have to be applied. Although most games will play on the Intel chips (except for the few that are specifically coded not to run on it), frame rates will often become unplayable, even at the lowest settings. The 965 chipset is marginally faster, and finally includes hardware T&L, but the integrated nature of the chipset still gives a large performance hit.
Computational functions
Modern GPUs use most of their transistors to do calculations related to
3D computer graphics. They were initially used to accelerate the memory-intensive work of
texture mapping and
rendering polygons, later adding units to accelerate
geometry calculations such as Translation (geometry)
vertex (geometry) into different
coordinate systems. Recent developments in GPUs include support for programmable shaders which can manipulate vertices and textures with many of the same operations supported by
Central processing unit,
oversampling and
interpolation techniques to reduce
aliasing, and very high-precision color spaces. Because most of these computations involve
Matrix (mathematics) and
Vector calculus operations, engineers and scientists have increasingly studied the use of GPUs for non-graphical calculations.
In addition to the 3D hardware, today's GPUs include basic 2D acceleration and frame buffer capabilities (usually with a VGA compatibility mode). In addition, most GPUs made since 1995 support the
YUV color space and
hardware overlays (important for
digital video playback), and many GPUs made since 2000 support MPEG primitives such as
motion compensation and
inverse discrete cosine transform. Recent graphics cards even decode high-definition video on the card, taking some load off the central processing unit.
GPU forms
Dedicated graphics cards
The most powerful class of GPUs typically interface with the motherboard by means of an
expansion slot such as PCI Express (PCIe) or
Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) and can usually be replaced or upgraded with relative ease, assuming the motherboard is capable of supporting the upgrade. A few graphics cards still use Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) slots, but their bandwidth is so limited that they are generally used only when a PCIe or AGP slot is unavailable.
A dedicated GPU is not necessarily removable, nor does it necessarily interface with the motherboard in a standard fashion. The term "dedicated" refers to the fact that dedicated graphics cards have
RAM that is dedicated to the card's use, not to the fact that
most dedicated GPUs are removable. Dedicated GPUs for portable computers are most commonly interfaced through a non-standard and often proprietary slot due to size and weight constraints. Such ports may still be considered PCIe or AGP in terms of their logical host interface, even if they are not physically interchangeable with their counterparts.
Multiple cards can draw together a single image, so that the number of pixels can be doubled and antialiasing can be set to higher quality. If the screen is parted into a left and right, each card can cache the textures and geometry from their side (See
Scalable Link Interface (SLI) and ATI CrossFire).
Integrated graphics solutions
X3000 IGP (under heatsink)
Integrated graphics solutions, or
shared graphics solutions are graphics processors that utilize a portion of a computer's system RAM rather than dedicated graphics memory. Such solutions are less expensive to implement than dedicated graphics solutions, but at a trade-off of being less capable. Historically, integrated solutions were often considered unfit to play 3D games or run graphically intensive programs such as Adobe Flash. (Examples of such IGPs would be offerings from SiS and VIA circa 2004.) However, todays integrated solutions such as the Intel's
Intel GMA (Intel G965), AMD's Radeon X1250 (AMD 690G) and NVIDIA's GeForce 7050 PV (
nForce 600) are more than capable of handling 2D graphics from Adobe Flash or low stress 3D graphics. Of course the aforementioned GPUs still struggle with high-end video games. Modern desktop motherboards often include an integrated graphics solution and have expansion slots available to add a dedicated graphics card later.
As a GPU is extremely memory intensive, an integrated solution finds itself competing for the already slow system RAM with the CPU as it has no dedicated video memory. System RAM may be 2 GB/s to 12.8 GB/s, yet dedicated GPUs enjoy between 10 GB/s and 160 GB/s of bandwidth depending on the model.
Older integrated graphics chipsets lacked hardware transform and lighting, but newer ones include it.
Hybrid solutions
This newer class of GPUs competes with integrated graphics in the low-end PC and notebook markets. The most common implementations of this are ATi's HyperMemory and NVIDIA's
TurboCache. Hybrid graphics cards are somewhat more expensive than integrated graphics, but much less expensive than dedicated graphics cards. These also share memory with the system memory, but have a smaller amount of memory on-board than discrete graphics cards do to make up for the high latency of the system RAM. Technologies within PCI Express can make this possible. While these solutions are sometimes advertised as having as much as 768MB of RAM, this refers to how much can be shared with the system memory.
Stream processing/GPGPU
A new concept application for GPUs is that of stream processing and the
GPGPU. This concept turns the massive floating-point computational power of a modern graphics accelerator's shader pipeline into general-purpose computing power, as opposed to being dedicated solely to graphical operations. In certain applications requiring massive vector operations, this can yield several orders of magnitude higher performance than a conventional CPU. The two largest discrete GPU designers,
ATI Technologies and
NVIDIA, are beginning to pursue this new market with an array of applications. ATI has teamed with Stanford University to create a GPU-based client for its Folding@Home distributed computing project that in certain circumstances yields results forty times faster than the conventional CPUs traditionally used in such applications.
See also
References
External links
- NVIDIA - What is a GPU?
- The GPU Gems book series
- Toms Hardware GPU beginners' Guide
- General-Purpose Computation Using Graphics Hardware
- How GPUs work
Graphics processing unit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A graphics processing unit or GPU (also occasionally called visual processing unit or VPU) is a dedicated graphics rendering device for a personal computer, workstation, or game ...
Video card - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A video card, also referred to as a graphics accelerator card, display adapter, graphics card, and numerous other terms, is an item of personal computer hardware whose function is ...
Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)
GPU: Changes Everything A ugust 31, 1999 marks the introduction of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for the PC industry. The technical definition of a GPU is "a single chip ...
graphics processing unit definition of graphics processing unit in the ...
Encyclopedia article about graphics processing unit. Information about graphics processing unit in the Columbia Encyclopedia, Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, computing dictionary.
Graphics processing unit - Hutchinson encyclopedia article about ...
Hutchinson encyclopedia article about Graphics processing unit. Graphics processing unit. Information about Graphics processing unit in the Hutchinson encyclopedia.
Graphics processing unit - encyclopedia article - Citizendium
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NVIDIA's new graphics processing unit goes on sale // News ...
NVIDIA's new graphics processing unit goes on sale High level of worldwide availability promised for the GeForce 7800 GTX
Bidirectional Ray Tracing on a Graphics Processing Unit
Bidirectional Ray Tracing on a Graphics Processing Unit. Proposer: Eric McKenzie , ram@inf , 505136. Self-Proposed: No. Supervisor: Eric McKenzie , ram@inf , 505136
Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)
GPU: Changes Everything A ugust 31, 1999 marks the introduction of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for the PC industry. The technical definition of a GPU is "a single chip ...
Graphics Processing Unit - Wikipedia
Nota disambigua – Se stai cercando altre voci che possono riferirsi alla stessa combinazione di 3 caratteri, vedi GPU (disambigua).
