Choosing the Right Graphics Card

Choosing the right graphics card has always been a difficult task. There are hundreds to choose from and many brands, model numbers and specifications to confuse the everyday computer user.

Whether you are building your own PC, upgrading your existing system the challenge to get it right first time is a difficult one.

When reading about all the different specifications & products obtainable it is simple to get bogged down & make a call based solely on promotion or sales hype.

The first step to choosing your graphics card is to pick exactly what you will be using it for. Are your demands for your PC graphics intensive? Are you a keen gamer & find your graphics card is not dealing with the newer games you need to play. Your main usage may lie in graphics work such as graphic design or photography.

To start with make a list of games you like to play or the graphics applications you use or need to make use of on your PC. A visit to the site of these games or application sites can lead to the basic knowledge they must get the ball rolling. Or in the event you have already bought a game or application package you ought to be able to finding these settings on the box or in the product knowledge be it a manual or CD. These sites or product knowledge will tell you the basic requirements & recommended requirements for playing or using the application. As a rule, always ignore the maximum requirements & take note of the recommended requirements. These are more important as these are the requirements for jogging all parts of a game or application suit. For example, if purchasing Adobe CS5 suite positive parts for video or 3d work cannot be installed if the graphics card does not have all the necessary features. Positive games cannot be run at full capability i.e. positive graphics setting will need to be turned off or specifications lowered if the graphics card is not capable or quick to run these features.

Getting it Right?

What does your motherboard support? This is important for beginning your research. Graphics cards are installed in to your PC by slot on the motherboard. If your computer is over 5 years old then your motherboard may have an older AGP slot.

Although AGP cards are still obtainable they have been replaced by PCI-E slots. If your motherboard still contains the AGP slot then you definitely ought to be thinking about a used PC or motherboard upgrade & all that will incorporate which is beyond the scope of this article.

PCI-E is the industry standard now & there is versions of this form factor, PCI-E & PCI-E it is important that you find out which your motherboard supports.

PCI-E is backwards compatible & will work in a PCI-E capable motherboard but the gains made by PCI-E format won't be obtainable on a PCI-E motherboard.

Making that Decision

The final decision ought to be made now that you have all the necessary knowledge to make a purchase. So what ought to you buy? You definitely have a budget for your purchase so this may limit what you can buy. Take a glance at lots of the hardware testing & review sites to see what they are saying about the latest graphics cards. These sites check & recommend graphics cards based on the results of their tests. Toms Hardware, MaximumPC & AnandTech have regular features & reviews for the latest technologies & graphics cards to help you compare your necessary specifications & make that final decision on which graphics card you need to improve your computers graphics performance.

AMD Delivers Multi-Display Support with Longevity on Latest Entry-Level Embedded Discrete GPU

Today at Embedded Systems Conference East, AMD (NYSE: AMD) introduced the AMD Radeon™ E6460 discrete graphics processor as AMD’s next generation entry-level embedded graphics processor and complements the previously announced AMD Radeon™ E6760.  With support for up to four simultaneous displays and more than double the 3D graphics performance of the ATI Radeon™ E2400 GPU¹, the AMD Radeon E6460 GPU sets a new bar for features and performance in an entry-level embedded GPU. With five years of planned supply availability and with the graphics memory included in the same package, the AMD Radeon E6460 GPU delivers the longevity, small footprint, and ease of design demanded by embedded system designers.

“The AMD Radeon E6460 GPU provides the high value, small footprint, and long supply demanded by embedded customers,” said Richard Jaenicke, director of Embedded Client Business for AMD.  “With a footprint-compatible subset of the high-performance AMD E6760 GPU, the new AMD Radeon E6460 GPU enables broadly scalable graphics and multimedia performance in a single board design.”

The AMD Radeon E6460 GPU enables an immersive experience with desktop-level 3D graphics and multimedia features:

• An advanced 3D graphics engine and programmable shader architecture supports Microsoft DirectX® 11 technology for superior graphics rendering.
• The third generation unified video decoder enables dual HD decode of H.264, VC-1, MPEG4 and MPEG2 compressed video streams.
• The 512 MB GDDR5 frame buffer included in the BGA package provides high memory bandwidth while reducing the total footprint of the platform solution and the effort needed to design and maintain the system over time.
• Targeted at casino gaming, digital signage, instrumentation and industrial control systems, the AMD Radeon E6460 GPU enables system designers to deliver products with value-conscious mindset.
• One system design, multiple customer product categories.  The BGA ballout of the AMD Radeon E6460 GPU is a subset of the higher performing AMD Radeon E6760 GPU enabling system designers to develop one system for both GPUs.
• Featuring multi-display support with AMD Eyefinity technology, the AMD Radeon E6460 GPU supports up to four independent output displays2, HDMI 1.4 stereoscopic video and DisplayPort 1.2 for higher link speeds and simplified display connectivity.
• The AMD Radeon E6460 GPU comes with five years of planned supply availability. Technical support is provided by a dedicated team of application engineering experts.
• AMD Radeon E6460 GPU can be paired with select models of AMD’s next generation high-performance Accelerated Processing Units (APU) to offer additional graphics capability and additional parallel computing power.

AMD’s full portfolio of Embedded Products, including the award-winning AMD Embedded G-Series platform, will be on display in booth 801 at the Embedded Systems Conference East in Boston, Massachusetts.

Source: AMD

AMD Radeon HD 7900 with Latest XDR2 Rambus Memory

A leaked AMD next-gen road map revealed what could possibly be the company's upcoming Radeon GPU roster for this fall. Initially consisting of new GPUs, these will be manufactured using the 28nm VLIW4 architecture & utilize GDDR5 memory. However, the high-end 7900 cards codenamed "Tahiti" will be armed with the much faster XDR2 memory interface, which AMD claims is times as quick as that of GDDR5, & consume 30 percent less power. Both the Radeon HD 7970 & 7950 also come equipped with an immense bandwidth of 32 GB/s, thanks to the PCIe Gen3 interface. The flagship Radeon HD 7970 has 2,048 Radeon Cores, 1,000 MHz GPU clock & 2GB XDR2 memory running at 8,000 MHz. Furthermore, the VLIW4 architecture present in the mainstream 7000 series will get replaced in favor of AMD's new Graphics CoreNext GPU architecture. The 7970 is expected to consume an average of 190 watts of power, which is 60 watts lower than the Radeon 6970's average power consumption. These are all impressive specs to be positive, but they won't be seeing the 7970 & 7950 cards strut their stuff until Q1 2012, at the earliest. All the same, AMD's next GPU salvo lines up much with its much anticipated 8-core Bulldozer FX CPUs, which ought to be obtainable Q4 2011.

What is Anti Aliasing and What Does It Do? -last part

Multisampling

Multisampling is a more efficient but slightly less kind of Anti-Aliasing. Multisampling takes multiple samples for each pixel. In a standard example the quincunx method takes samples in the corners & sample in the middle. Each of these samples is given a weight the corners are given a weight of 1/8 each & the centre sample is given a weight of 1/2. The color of the pixel is then determined by similar calculations to Supersampling.

 

With multisampling each cell on has samples in it. Taking a glance at the diagram below you can see that the other samples are taken from neighboring cells. So multisampling takes in to account the colors around the pixel in query. This is the way you receive a blend of color to accomplish the desired result. It is important to note that Multisampling only happens when a cell is covered my over color, otherwise a single color is selected & does not need to be calculated.

Levels of Anti-Aliasing

This refers to the amount of samples taken to pick the color of the pixel. The higher the sample rate the better the quality of picture but the slower the picture will be rendered. FSAA will be often called FSAA 2x or FSAA 4x, 6x & 8x are also available but have a bigger performance hit & need more powerful graphics cards.

2x FSAA

The picture above shows samples taken from a graphics card using FSAA 2x, samples are taken in corners & used to produce the pixels color. With FSAA 4x below you simply double the amount of samples taken for each pixel from FSAA 2x.

4x FSAA

When this is completed on every pixel along an edge, the blending is much smoother & even less noticeable. As always though, the trick is to balance quality & performance for your individual machine.

Pros & Cons - The Summary

There are pros & cons for using anti-aliasing in both games & applications. They have been through them but here is a rapid summery to help you make up your mind if using AA or FSAA is best for you & your PC

Pros

• Smoothes out screen fonts
• Rounded edges look to have smooth curves
• Type can be simpler to read due to better quality fonts
• Games look a lot prettier & more realistic

Cons

• Tiny text can be blurred to read
• Already sharp edges can be made fuzzier
• You can’t print out Anti-Aliased text as it blurs
• Static picture sizes are larger
• Games are affected by lower frame rates

What is Anti Aliasing and What Does It Do? part 2

Why does Anti-Aliasing slow down frame rates?

This is a simple. Anti-Aliasing is done by specific calculations to choose which pixels are drawn additional & in what shade to accomplish the desired result. The graphics card usually takes charge of this task. Due to these additional calculations the graphics card has to give a quantity of its processing power to finishing these calculations. This affects the amount of processing power left to render the scene.

Usually the frame rates are affected by the amount of pixels per second your graphics card can render, providing the CPU & other parts can keep up. When you are using anti-aliasing the amount of pixels that your graphics card can render will lower by a degree & therefore cut your frame rates in games down.

What is FSAA?

FSAA stands for Full Scene Anti Aliasing & is used as the most common term for Anti-Aliasing in the gaming world. FSAA refers to a process of Anti-Aliasing that affects the whole screen not a certain picture. When playing a game with FSAA turned on the graphics card will run an Anti-Aliasing algorithm on every frame from top to bottom removing jagged edges from the whole scene. This can have a giant hit on performance in games & has only been overcome recently by having much more powerful graphics cards on the market.

Types of Anti Aliasing

There are main types of Anti-Aliasing techniques, Multisampling & Supersampling. There are varieties of each as graphics card manufacturers find improved ways of getting the same result. Finding ways to limit the performance hit is the main priority. Here they will look at the general picture of the techniques. First they will concentrate on Supersampling.

Supersampling

Supersampling is a process of Anti-Aliasing by taking the corners of each pixel & generating what would be the average color. This is then the displayed pixel on the screen. By doing this you are effectively smudging the picture & averaging out the color along a curve.

This basic graphic shows you what would happen when Supersampling is used in the squares in the center of this picture. Three of the four squares are in both red & white areas & so will be displayed as a shade of orange. One of the squares is fully in the white zone & so that pixel will be displayed as a pure white pixel. If of the samples was taken from an area that was full in the red zone then that pixel would be displayed as fully red.

Obviously samples are much more complex than this, having plenty of more colors to average out; however the principles stay the same. A mathematical calculation is done to choose the average color for each pixel. Effectively Supersampling renders the scene times larger than the true scene & is then scaled down time the calculations are complete. This process has a giant performance hit but does give the best results.

continued in part 3, stay tuned and subscribe to us for updates!

What is Anti Aliasing and What Does It Do?

Anti-Aliasing is a term used lots when selling graphics cards, but what exactly is Anti-Aliasing? They look deeper in to the reasoning behind Anti-Aliasing & why they require it in the first place. There is varying types of anti-aliasing producing different results & different levels of performance hit.

 

More about Anti-Aliasing

AA is a process of fooling the eye that a jagged edge is smooth. Anti-Aliasing is often referred in games & on graphics cards. In games the chance to smooth edges of the images goes a long way to making a realistic 3D picture on the screen. Keep in mind though that AA does not actually smooth any edges of images it merely fools the eye. Like plenty of things they are only designed to be lovely. In the event you cannot tell the difference then that is fine. Let’s take a glance at the example below to demonstrate the effects of AA.

 

 

The letter on the left is a blown up letter "a" with no anti-aliasing. The letter on the right has had anti-aliasing applied to it. In this blown up form it looks like it’s fundamentally blurred but in the event that they reduce the size down to a more standard size you might even see the difference.

Now look closely at the letters. You can still tell that the letter of the left is jagged but the letter on the right looks a lot smoother & less blurry than the example above. Keep in mind I have only shrunk the picture down back to normal size & have not altered anything else to the picture at all. So as you can see, AA brings a way more pleasing picture to the eye. Something like what comes out of a high class printer than what you can be used to seeing when on a computer screen.

What are Jagged Edges?

Jagged edges are cause by limitations in a computer screen; whether that is a CRT or LCD screen it’s all the same. Monitors are capable of producing ideal straight lines either horizontally or vertically, but when it comes to diagonal lines of any angle your monitor is unable to producing a line without some jagged edge. This is because your screen is made up of pixels in a grid formation. When you draw a diagonal line on a computer screen it is to cross several grid lines, because pixels generate blocks of color diagonal lines displace these blocks slightly causing jagged edges, Check out the following example to see what happens on your screen.

 This is a graphic on a grid of how they would draw a diagonal line on a grid. As you can to receive a straight line they must cross over the grid lines. Here is a graphic of how a computer would draw the same line.

As you can see the line is jagged. This is because the grid squares are pixels & half a pixel cannot be color & half the other. The pixel is red or white in this case. And this is how the line looks like when AA is activated:

Newer monitors are combating the issue themselves by decreasing the dot pitch. Dot pitch is the space between pixels. The closer the pixels the less jagged to lines appear. However while this can decrease the effects it cannot solve them.

Continued at part 2, stay tuned!