|
Texture Mapping Unit
In computer graphics, a texture mapping unit (TMU) is a component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs). They are able to rotate, resize, and distort a bitmap image to be placed onto an arbitrary plane of a given 3D model as a texture, in a process called texture mapping. In modern graphics cards it is implemented as a discrete stage in a graphics pipeline, whereas when first introduced it was implemented as a separate processor, e.g. as seen on the Voodoo2 graphics card. Background and history The TMU came about due to the compute demands of sampling and transforming a flat image (as the texture map) to the correct angle and perspective it would need to be in 3D space. The compute operation is a large matrix multiply, which CPUs of the time (early Pentiums for example) could not cope with at an acceptable level of performance. In 2013, TMUs are part of the shader pipeline and decoupled from the Render Output Pipelines (ROPs). For example, in AMD's Cypress GPU, each s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Graphics
Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great deal of specialized hardware and software has been developed, with the displays of most devices being driven by graphics hardware, computer graphics hardware. It is a vast and recently developed area of computer science. The phrase was coined in 1960 by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. It is often abbreviated as CG, or typically in the context of film as Computer-generated imagery, computer generated imagery (CGI). The non-artistic aspects of computer graphics are the subject of Computer graphics (computer science), computer science research. Some topics in computer graphics include user interface design, Sprite (computer graphics), sprite graphics, raster graphics, Rendering (computer graph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Video Card
A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics accelerator, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or colloquially GPU) is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a display device such as a computer monitor, monitor. Graphics cards are sometimes called ''discrete'' or ''dedicated'' graphics cards to emphasize their distinction to an graphics processing unit#Integrated graphics processing unit, integrated graphics processor on the motherboard or the central processing unit (CPU). A graphics processing unit (GPU) that performs the necessary computations is the main component in a graphics card, but the acronym "GPU" is sometimes also used to refer to the graphics card as a whole erroneously. Most graphics cards are not limited to simple display output. The graphics processing unit can be used for additional processing, which reduces the load from the CPU. Additionally, computing platforms such as OpenCL and C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Execution Unit
In computer engineering, an execution unit (E-unit or EU) is a part of a processing unit that performs the operations and calculations forwarded from the instruction unit. It may have its own internal control sequence unit (not to be confused with a CPU's main control unit), some registers, and other internal units such as an arithmetic logic unit, address generation unit, floating-point unit, load–store unit, branch execution unit or other smaller and more specific components, and can be tailored to support a certain datatype, such as integers An integer is the number zero (0), a positive natural number (1, 2, 3, ...), or the negation of a positive natural number (−1, −2, −3, ...). The negations or additive inverses of the positive natural numbers are referred to as negative in ... or floating-points. It is common for modern processing units to have multiple parallel functional units within its execution units, which is referred to as superscalar design. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interpolation
In the mathematics, mathematical field of numerical analysis, interpolation is a type of estimation, a method of constructing (finding) new data points based on the range of a discrete set of known data points. In engineering and science, one often has a number of data points, obtained by sampling (statistics), sampling or experimentation, which represent the values of a function for a limited number of values of the Dependent and independent variables, independent variable. It is often required to interpolate; that is, estimate the value of that function for an intermediate value of the independent variable. A closely related problem is the function approximation, approximation of a complicated function by a simple function. Suppose the formula for some given function is known, but too complicated to evaluate efficiently. A few data points from the original function can be interpolated to produce a simpler function which is still fairly close to the original. The resulting gai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Texture Maps
Texture may refer to: Science and technology * Image texture, the spatial arrangement of color or intensities in an image * Surface texture, the smoothness, roughness, or bumpiness of the surface of an object * Texture (roads), road surface characteristics with waves shorter than road roughness * Texture (cosmology), a theoretical topological defect in the structure of spacetime * Crystallographic texture, distribution of crystallographic orientations in a polycrystalline material * Texture (geology), a physical appearance or character of a rock * Texture mapping, a bitmap image applied to a surface in computer graphics * Soil texture, a relative proportion of grain sizes of a soil Arts * Texture (visual arts), an element of design and its application in art Music * Texture (music), an overall sound created by the interaction of aspects of a piece of music * ''Textures'' (album), a 1989 album by Brian Eno * Textures (band), a metal band from the Netherlands, who form ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GPGPU
General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by the central processing unit (CPU). The use of multiple video cards in one computer, or large numbers of graphics chips, further parallelizes the already parallel nature of graphics processing. Essentially, a GPGPU pipeline is a kind of parallel processing between one or more GPUs and CPUs that analyzes data as if it were in image or other graphic form. While GPUs operate at lower frequencies, they typically have many times the number of cores. Thus, GPUs can process far more pictures and graphical data per second than a traditional CPU. Migrating data into graphical form and then using the GPU to scan and analyze it can create a large speedup. GPGPU pipelines were developed at the beginning of the 21st century for grap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Framebuffer
A framebuffer (frame buffer, or sometimes framestore) is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Modern video cards contain framebuffer circuitry in their cores. This circuitry converts an in-memory bitmap into a video signal that can be displayed on a computer monitor. In computing, a screen buffer is a part of computer memory used by a computer application for the representation of the content to be shown on the computer display. The screen buffer may also be called the video buffer, the regeneration buffer, or regen buffer for short. Screen buffers should be distinguished from video memory. To this end, the term off-screen buffer is also used. The information in the buffer typically consists of color values for every pixel to be shown on the display. Color values are commonly stored in 1-bit binary (monochrome), 4-bit palettized, 8 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Antialiasing
Anti-aliasing may refer to any of a number of techniques to combat the problems of aliasing in a sampled signal such as a digital image or digital audio recording. Specific topics in anti-aliasing include: * Anti-aliasing filter, a filter used before a signal sampler to restrict the bandwidth of a signal such as in audio applications. * Manual anti-aliasing, an artistic technique done in pixel art graphics to smooth transitions between shapes, soften lines or blur edges. * Computer-generated imagery (CGI), the application of computer graphics for creating or improving images in art, printed media, simulators, videos and video games. * Spatial anti-aliasing, the technique of minimizing aliasing when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution ** Fast approximate anti-aliasing (FXAA), an anti-aliasing algorithm created by Timothy Lottes under Nvidia. May also be referred to as Fast Sample Anti-aliasing (FSAA). ** Multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA), a type of spatial a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Render Output Unit
In computer graphics, the render output unit or raster operations pipeline (ROP) is a hardware component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs) and one of the final steps in the rendering process of modern graphics cards. The pixel pipelines take pixel (each pixel is a dimensionless point) and texel information and process it, via specific matrix and vector operations, into a final pixel or depth value; this process is called rasterization. Thus, ROPs control antialiasing, when more than one sample is merged into one pixel. The ROPs perform the transactions between the relevant buffers in the local memory – this includes writing or reading values, as well as blending them together. Dedicated antialiasing hardware used to perform hardware-based antialiasing methods like MSAA is contained in ROPs. All data rendered has to travel through the ROP in order to be written to the framebuffer, from there it can be transmitted to the display. Therefore, the ROP is where the GPU ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Texture Filtering
In computer graphics, texture filtering or texture smoothing is the method used to determine the texture color for a Texture mapping, texture mapped pixel, using the colors of nearby Texel (graphics), texels (ie. pixels of the texture). Filtering describes how a texture is applied at many different shapes, size, angles and scales. Depending on the chosen filter algorithm, the result will show varying degrees of blurriness, detail, Spatial anti-aliasing, spatial aliasing, Temporal anti-aliasing, temporal aliasing and blocking. Depending on the circumstances, filtering can be performed in software (such as a software rendering package) or in hardware, eg. with either real time or graphics processing unit, GPU accelerated rendering circuits, or in a mixture of both. For most common interactive graphical applications, modern texture filtering is performed by Texture mapping unit, dedicated hardware which optimizes memory access through memory cacheing and Cache prefetching, pre-fetch, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vertex Shader
In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene—a process known as '' shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of specialized functions in computer graphics special effects and video post-processing, as well as general-purpose computing on graphics processing units. Traditional shaders calculate rendering effects on graphics hardware with a high degree of flexibility. Most shaders are coded for (and run on) a graphics processing unit (GPU), though this is not a strict requirement. ''Shading languages'' are used to program the GPU's rendering pipeline, which has mostly superseded the fixed-function pipeline of the past that only allowed for common geometry transforming and pixel-shading functions; with shaders, customized effects can be used. The position and color ( hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast) of all pixels, vertices, and/or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
