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Understanding Video Cards

O

obi-kun

n00b
Joined
Jun 20, 2008
Messages
33
Hey guys, I'd like to really understand how a video card works and its different components such as the GPU. And what the terms "shaders" and stuff really are. I've tried looking around, wikipedia has some stuff but is there a more condensed learning site out there somewhere?
 
An understanding of software (3D APIs) will lead to an understanding of hardware (how data flows through hardware components and what each stage is responsible for). For that, see MSDN's explanation of the Direct3D 11 pipeline. This should give you enough for you to be able to search for more specific information.
 
How Stuff Works is a good place to start.

This gives a general idea of each components on a graphic card, why we have memory or RAM on a graphic card, and so on.
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/graphics-card.htm

Inside the GPU, the graphic processor on the card itself, that's where things gets interesting as well as complicated. GPU is a processor that's initially design to do the specific task in rendering a graphics, the vertex and pixel shaders are design to specifically carry out certain task that is done in 3D rendering.

If you REALLY want to know the workings of a graphic processing unit, there are some papers out there you should read.

Evolution of the Graphical Processing Unit
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.142.368&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Skip to Chapter 3 The Modern GPU
 
Thanks guys, I was having a hard time looking for specific info. I'll look through them.
 
Also, if you have an IEEE membership, they have had a lot of good articles referencing GPU operations.
 
Nope, just studying for a+ cert and am curious about how video cards work. I was looking through a book on optimization of GPU's, and it was really advanced with graduate level equations, I saw one of Schrodinger's equations. I never thought so much went into something that was for entertainment purposes, especially the software side of things.
 
obi-kun said:
Nope, just studying for a+ cert and am curious about how video cards work. I was looking through a book on optimization of GPU's, and it was really advanced with graduate level equations, I saw one of Schrodinger's equations. I never thought so much went into something that was for entertainment purposes, especially the software side of things.
Click to expand...

At its core it's parallel processing theory. Much much more than just "entertainment purposes." Notice how on www.top500.org some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world are using GPUs to increase their computational performance.
 
I tried looking up the exact specs of the k computer but all it lists are the number of cores. (Are they counting GPU's as CPU cores?)

Like in general, all I see are GPU's used for games and such. Are they more prevealent in scientific and educational institutions? Such as when NVIDIA and AMD does research for their chips, are the people doing the research the same as the guys in the universities and research laboratories?

Thanks guys so far for all the info. I need to do way more studying to even begin to understand the spec sheet of these super computers. Here's the k: http://www.hotchips.org/archives/hc....25.51A.Maruyama-Fujitsu-Octo-Core-VIIIfx.pdf

I'm guessing that's just the CPU.

edit: I fixed some grammar.
 
Last edited:
I tried looking up the exact specs of the k computer but all it lists are the number of cores. (Are they counting GPU's as CPU cores?)
Click to expand...

K computer isn't using GPUs. Look at #2, 4, and 5 though. You can see they list using Nvidia Tesla C2050 cards.

Like in general, all I see are GPU's used for games and such. Are they more prevealent in scientific and educational institutions? Such as when NVIDIA and AMD does research for their chips, are the people doing the research the same as the guys in the universities and research laboratories?
Click to expand...

GPUs work orders of magnitude better than CPUs for parallel computing (lots of workloads that don't depend on each other). In the graphical sense one "core" controls one pixel on your screen while another controls another pixel (this is a very basic example). What happens to pixel 1 doesn't affect pixel 2 thus they can be computed in parallel. Like pixels the many "cores/processors" in a GPU are used to model things like particle behavior. I know my alma mater uses GPUs for research and teaches a course on CUDA, but the universities are doing research using GPUs, not doing research to improve the GPUs like AMD/NV are.
 
So is this why a 6970 has 1536 cores? Every core inside a 6970 is handling a different part of what I see on the screen at once?

Thanks for the info and correction, I'll concentrate on a+ first before delving too deep into this. Like, I have some questions that I know I wouldn't understand the answer to.
 
obi-kun said:
So is this why a 6970 has 1536 cores? Every core inside a 6970 is handling a different part of what I see on the screen at once?

Thanks for the info and correction, I'll concentrate on a+ first before delving too deep into this. Like, I have some questions that I know I wouldn't understand the answer to.

But, should I think of a GPU core in the same way as a CPU core? Like my Core2Duo has "2 cores" running at 3.16 GHz. The 6970 has 1536 cores running at 880 MHz (?), is that right?
Click to expand...
May not directly answer your question, but there is a tremendous amount of information about some things at http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1345126 regarding cores, GPUs vs CPUs vs Cell vs Parallel-processing CPU, and parallelism. Also see http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1035571681&postcount=29
 
Ahh you quoted my post before I edited. The reason I edited was I decided to research info on my own and found out the answer. The CPU is better geared to tasks that are non-repetitive, while GPU's are better at lots of repetitive tasks.

Thanks for the links though. That's cool, I guess they are looking at PS3 emulation already.
 
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