T Need 3 D Graphics Card example essay topic

Annotation As an idea of 3 D graphics is not old, it's very useful to find out what product or which manufacturer to choose if you re about to buy something from this new breed in graphics 3 D card market. In this test there were 9 cards tested and they came from 7 different manufacturers. Three others weren t able to take part because of being in process of developing their new products. Some cards tested offered both 2 D and 3 D acceleration, while others were dedicated 3 D-only cards. The question is Why - why there is a need for 3 D acceleration The screens are two-dimensional, but scenes they represent in games and CAD applications are often created in 3 D, and the processing power to handle them is immense. Although today's PC processors are fast, but they aren t able to cope with both usual and 3 D graphics processing - and this is a reason for the advent of 3 D graphics cards.

There is no doubt that the appearance of action games has improved considerably with the introduction of dedicated 3 D accelerators - taking a look at recent titles such as Unreal or Forsaken proves that. 3 D graphics cards are being developed for the use not only in games - 3 D graphics design programs can render complicated objects much faster using 3 D accelerators, but still you must ensure that the card you choose supports the operating environment that your graphics application requires. There is, however, one area of the PC market in which 3 D acceleration is useless - that is for standard corporate PC's, as they usually are being used for E-mailing, word processing, spreadsheet manipulation or image processing applications. There are two main graphics interface types - Peripheral Connections Interface (PCI), and Advanced Graphics Port (AGP), as such one as VL-BUS is too paltry to pay attention to. At the time of writing this annotation the question which interface to choose is unnecessary, but at the time when thi article was issued, AGP was on his advent, so there were not many graphics cards based on AGP on the market. PCI offer 33 MHz bandwidth, which is more than adequate for 2 D acceleration, but insufficient for 3 D processing.

As games developers paid more attention to 3 D objects to look more real, textures in 3 D games were getting a lot larger. Since they were normally applied as uncompressed bitmaps, memory capacity of graphics cards was to rise considerably. AGP implementation allows 3 D graphics cards to store 3 D textures in the PC's main memory due to high-bandwidth (second generation of AGP offers bandwidth of 133 MHz). There is no doubt that AGP reduces the level of silicon on board, hence 3 D graphics cards price crash during the last six months. AGP graphics devices can use all of their memory for 2 D, while PCI is dedicated for cards that are only 3 D and need 2 D output signal from other, PCI, graphics card. Four of the cards tested had voodoo 2 chipset backed up with 12 Mb of memory.

All of them were PCI devices. They are not stand-alone cards as they need second, dedicated 2 D card, which they intercept signal from. To compare with other cards tested, they are heavily populated - having 3 chips and 24 memory modules on board each, they don t seem to be the neatest cards... But their performance does seem to be at the top of the notch. ATI's All-in-wonder Pro was the card with the largest number of features incorporated on a single chip. Based on PCI or AGP 2 X interface, it features 2 D and 3 D acceleration, on-board tuner and output sockets for connection to a TV set, as well as video capture capabilities.

It's a pity, but this card, together with Diamond Stealth, stood at the bottom of the table in all tests which were performed. Matrox came to tests with their brand new product - G 200, based on Matrox's own controller. Equipped with 8 Mb of memory and being an AGP device, this card really hits the highest point. Intel i 740 chipset we had in two cards - Real 3 D StarFighter and Diamond Stealth G 460. Both of them didn t performed as well as leaders, so Intel should do more work to develop its graphics chips. The last and one of the most versatile cards tested was STB's Velocity 128 based on Nvidia's latest chip Riva 128.

There is only AGP version available, as there were no any claims about Nvidia's efforts until this year. And they started well - Velocity 128 seems to be the best of all 9 cards tested, being available at the price half of those based on voodoo 2 chip. To conclude, I must say that you don t need 3 D graphics card at all if you are not prepared to spend 150$ at least. These tests showed us that particular cards work best on particular games or applications, which are written especially for them.

While we don t have several standard API's, we won t be able to judge about these cards without any doubt.