1. Raghu Machiraju Slides: Courtesy - Prof. Huamin Wang, CSE, OSU
CSE 581: Module 2 - Hardware
Raghu Machiraju
Slides: Courtesy - Prof. Huamin Wang, CSE, OSU

2. Architecture Keyboard and mouse Graphics card Power CPU Hard drive
DVD ROM
Memory

3. Raster Graphics Systems
Raster: Images are represented by an array of picture elements (pixels).

4. Frame Buffer Screen resolution Refresh rate Pixel format
1 bit: black & white
8 bits: 256 levels of gray
32 bits: 16 million colors
(true color)

5. Size of Frame Buffer Number of pixels × Bits per pixel
Screen resolution
Pixel format
For example, the screen is 1960×1080 with 24 bits per pixel, how big is the frame buffer?
Frame buffer may store other information, such as depth values.
1960×1080×24=51M bits = 6M bytes

6. A Prototype Graphics System
CPU
Memory
Frame buffer in main memory?
Frame buffer
System bus (motherboard)
Video
controller

7. An Early Graphics System
CPU
Memory
System bus (motherboard)
Graphics memory: on-board frame buffer for faster access
Graphics memory
Video
controller
Graphics card/video card/display card

8. An Early Graphics System
CPU
Memory
System bus (motherboard)
A processor dedicated for graphics
processing
Graphics memory
Video
controller
Graphics processor (GPU)
Graphics card

9. Companies Building Graphics Cards

10. Comparison
(Flops: Floating-point operations)

11. Evaluation

12. Graphics Pipeline: Software

13. Graphics Pipeline: Hardware
Geometry stage
Rasterization stage

14. Graphics Bus Interface: Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)
CPU
Memory
System bus (motherboard)
PCI bus
133MB/s
Other peripherals:
wireless card,
sound card, …
Graphics memory
Video
controller
Graphics processor (GPU)
Graphics card

15. Problems with PCI PCI bus becomes a bottleneck!
Shared with other devices.
Lots of data from main memory to graphics memory: textures, geometry…
Example: 2M triangles, 90 bytes each =>
180 MB > 133 MB (PCI bandwidth)

16. Graphics Bus Interface: Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP)
CPU
Memory
System bus (motherboard)
PCI bus
AGP bus
AGP 1.1: 533 MB/s
AGP 3.0: 2133 MB/s
132 MB/s
Other peripherals:
wireless card,
sound card, …
Graphics memory
Video
controller
Graphics processor (GPU)
Graphics card

17. Features of AGP No local bus congestion.
Faster data transfer (20 times faster than PCI).
More geometry can be transferred.
Direct execution of many operations from the man memory.

18. Graphics Bus Interface: Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI-e)
CPU
Memory
System bus (motherboard)
3GB/s
(Shared, parallel) PCI-e bus
Other peripherals:
wireless card,
sound card, …
Graphics memory
Video
controller
Graphics processor (GPU)
Graphics card

19. Readings & Labs
Textbook: Chapter 1 & 2