graphics device system
DESCRIPTION
Graphics Device System. Graphical System. 5 major elements for a computer graphic system Processor Memory Frame buffer Input devices Output Devices. Output Technology (1/3). Calligraphic Displays also called vector, stroke or line drawing graphics lines drawn directly on phosphor - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
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Graphics Device System
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Graphical System
5 major elements for a computer graphic system
Processor Memory Frame buffer Input devices Output Devices
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Output Technology (1/3)
Calligraphic Displays also called vector, stroke or line drawing
graphics lines drawn directly on phosphor
display processor directs electron beam according to list of lines defined in a "display list“
phosphors glow for only a few micro-seconds so lines must be redrawn or refreshed constantly
deflection speed limits # of lines that can be drawn without flicker.
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Output Technology (2/3)
Raster Display Display primitives (lines, shaded regions,
characters) stored as pixels in refresh buffer (or frame buffer)
Electron beam scans a regular pattern of horizontal raster lines connected by horizontal retraces and vertical retrace
Video controller coordinates the repeated scanning
Pixels are individual dots on a raster line
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Output Technology (cont)
Bitmap is the collection of pixels Frame buffer stores the bitmap Raster display store the display primitives (line, c
haracters, and solid shaded or patterned area) Frame buffers
are composed of VRAM (video RAM). VRAM is dual-ported memory capable of
Random access Simultaneous high-speed serial output: built-in serial
shift register can output entire scanline at high rate synchronized to pixel clock.
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Pros and Cons
Advantages to Raster Displays lower cost filled regions/shaded images
Disadvantages to Raster Displays a discrete representation, continuous primitives
must be scan-converted (i.e. fill in the appropriate scan lines)
Aliasing or "jaggies" Arises due to sampling error when converting from a continuous to a discrete representation
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Basic Definitions
Raster: A rectangular array of points or dots.
Pixel (Pel): One dot or picture element of the raster
Scan line: A row of pixels
Video raster devices display an image by sequentially drawing out the pixels of the scan lines that form the raster.
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Resolution
Maximum number of points that can be displayed without overlap on a CRT monitor
Dependent on Type of phosphor m Intensity to be displayed m Focusing and deflection systems m
REL SGI O2 monitors: 1280 x 1024
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Example
Television NTSC 640x480x8b 1/4 MB GA-HDTV 1920x1080x8b ~2 MB
Workstations Bitmapped display 960x1152x1b ~1 Mb Color workstation 1280x1024x24b 5 MB
Laserprinters 300 dpi (8.5”x300)(11”x300) 1.05 MB 2400 dpi (8.5”x2400)(11”x2400) ~64 MB
Film (line pairs/mm) 35mm (diagonal) slide (ASA25~125 lp/mm) = 3000
3000 x 2000 x 3 x 12b ~27 MB
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Aspect Ratio
Frame aspect ratio (FAR) = horizontal/vertical sizeTV 4:3HDTV 16:9Page 8.5:11 ~ 3/435mm 3:2Panavision 2.35:1 (2:1 anamorphic)Vistavision 2.35:1 (1.5 anamorphic)
Pixel aspect ratio (PAR) = FAR vres/hresNuisance in graphics if not 1
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Physical Size
Physical size: Length of the screen diagonal (typically 12 to 27 inches)
REL SGI O2 monitors: 19 inches
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Refresh Rates and Bandwidth
Frames per second (FPS) Film (double framed) 24 FPS TV (interlaced) 30 FPS x 1/4 = 8 MB/s Workstation (non-interlaced) 75 FPS x 5 =
375 MB/s
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Interlaced Scanning
Scan frame 30 times per second To reduce flicker, divide frame into two fields—one
consisting of the even scan lines and the other of the odd scan lines.
Even and odd fields are scanned out alternately to produce an interlaced image.
1/30 SEC
1/60 SEC
FIELD 1 FIELD 2
FRAME
1/60 SEC
1/30 SEC
1/60 SEC
FIELD 1 FIELD 2
FRAME
1/60 SEC
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Frame Buffer
A frame buffer is characterized by is size, x, y, and pixel depth.
the resolution of a frame buffer is the number of pixels in the display. e.g. 1024x1024 pixels.
Bit Planes or Bit Depth is the number of bits corresponding to each pixel. This determines the color resolution of the buffer.
Bilevel or monochrome displays have 1 bit/pixel (128Kbytes of RAM)8bits/pixel -> 256 simultaneous colors24bits/pixel -> 16 million simultaneous colors
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Specifying Color
direct color : each pixel directly
specifies a color value
e.g., 24bit : 8bits(R) + 8bits(G) + 8 bits(B)
palette-based color : indirect specification
use palette (CLUT) e.g., 8 bits pixel can
represent 256 colors
Green
Red
Blue
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8
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24 bits plane, 8 bits per color gun.
224 = 16,777,216
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Lookup Tables
Video controller often uses a lookup table to allow indirection of display values in frame buffer.
Allows flexible use of colors without lots of frame-buffer memory. Allows change of display without remapping underlying data double
buffering. Permits simple animation. Common sizes: 8 x 12; 8 x 24; 12 x 24.
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Color Look-Up Table
Frame Buffer
CLUT
127 127
0
255
2083 00000000 00000100 00010011
to blue gun
to green gun
to red gunx
y
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Pseudo Color
0
1
2
3
254
255
RED GREEN BLUE
256 colors chosen from a palette of 16,777,216.
Each entry in the color map LUT can be user defined.
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Cathode Ray tube
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Display Technology
2D Displays CRT LCD (raster) plasma screen (raster) Light valves (raster) Micromirror (raster) Projected laser (vector) Direct laser (vector)
3D Displays Stereo presentation
(raster/vector) Vibrating mirror (vector) Helical rotor (vector) LED plate (raster) Photoactive cube
(raster) Parabolic mirror (raster)
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Display Technologies
Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs) Most common display device today Evacuated glass bottle (last
of the vacuum tubes) Heating element (filament) Electrons pulled towards
anode focusing cylinder Vertical and horizontal deflection plates Beam strikes phosphor coating on front of tube
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Display Technologies: CRTs
Vector Displays First computer displays: basically an
oscilloscope Control X,Y with vertical/horizontal plate
voltage Often used intensity as Z
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Vector Display Architecture
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Display Technologies: CRTs
Raster Displays Black and white television: an oscilloscope with a fixed
scan pattern: left to right, top to bottom Paint entire screen 30 times/sec
Actually, TVs paint top-to-bottom 60 times/sec, alternating between even and odd scanlines
This is called interlacing. It’s a hack. To paint the screen, computer needs to synchronize
with the scanning pattern of raster Solution: special memory to buffer image with scan-out
synchronous to the raster. We call this the framebuffer.
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Raster displays Architecture
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Raster refresh
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Comparing Raster and Vector (1/2)
advantages of vector: very fine detail of line drawings (sometimes curves), wh
ereas raster suffers from jagged edge problem due to pixels (aliasing, quantization errors)
geometry objects (lines) whereas raster only handles pixels
eg. 1000 line plot: vector disply computes 2000 endpoints
raster display computes all pixels on each line
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Comparing Raster and Vector (2/2
advantages of raster: cheaper colours, textures, realism unlimited complexity of picture: whatever you p
ut in refresh buffer, whereas vector complexity limited by refresh rate
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Display Technology: Color CRTs
Color CRTs are much more complicated Requires manufacturing very precise geometry Uses a pattern of color phosphors on the screen:
Delta electron gun arrangement In-line electron gun arrangement
http://www.udayton.edu/~cps/cps460/notes/displays/
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Display Technology: Color CRTs
Color CRTs have Three electron guns A metal shadow mask to differentiate the
beams
http://www.udayton.edu/~cps/cps460/notes/displays/
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Display Technology: Raster
CRT (raster) pros: Leverages low-cost CRT technology (i.e., TVs) Bright! Display emits light
Cons: Requires screen-size memory array Discreet sampling (pixels) Practical limit on size (call it 40 inches) Bulky Finicky (convergence, warp, etc) X-ray radiation…
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Display Technology: LCDs
Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs) LCDs: organic molecules, naturally in crystalline state,
that liquefy when excited by heat or E field Crystalline state twists polarized light 90º.
http://www.udayton.edu/~cps/cps460/notes/displays/
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LCDs
Transmissive & reflective LCDs: LCDs act as light valves, not light emitters, and thus rely on an
external light source. Laptop screen: backlit, transmissive display Palm Pilot/Game Boy: reflective display
http://www.udayton.edu/~cps/cps460/notes/displays/
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Active-Matrix LCDs
LCDs must be constantly refreshed, or they fade back to their crystalline state Refresh applied in a raster-like scanning pattern Passive LCDs: short-burst refresh, followed by long
slow fade in which LCD is between On & Off Not very crisp, prone to ghosting
Active matrix LCDs have a transistor and capacitor at every cell FET transfers charge into capacitor during scan Capacitor easily holds charge till next refresh
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Active Matrix LCDs Pros and Cons
Active-matrix pros: crisper with less ghosting,low cost, low weight,flat, small size, low power consumption.
Active-matrix cons: more expensive, small size, low contrast, slow response
Today, most things seemto be active-matrix
More on Displayhttp://www.udayton.edu/~cps/cps460/notes/displays/
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Plasma
Plasma display panels Similar in principle to
fluorescent light tubes Small gas-filled capsules
are excited by electric field,emits UV light
UV excites phosphor Phosphor relaxes, emits
some other color
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Plasma Display Panel Pros and Cons
Plasma Display Panel Pros Large viewing angle Good for large-format displays Fairly bright
Cons Still very expensive Large pixels (~1 mm versus ~0.2 mm) Phosphors gradually deplete Less bright than CRTs, using more power
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Display Technology: DMDs
Digital Micromirror Devices (projectors) Microelectromechanical (MEM) devices,
fabricated with VLSI techniques
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DMDs Pros and Cons
DMDs are truly digital pixels Vary grey levels by modulating pulse length Color: multiple chips, or color-wheel Great resolution Very bright Flicker problems
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FEDs
Field Emission Devices (FEDs) Like a CRT, with many small
electron guns at each pixel Unreliable electrodes, needs vacuum Thin, but limited in size
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Organic LED Arrays
Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) Arrays The display of the future? Many think so. OLEDs function like regular semiconductor LEDs But with thin-film polymer construction:
Thin-film deposition or vacuum deposition process…not grown like a crystal, no high-temperature doping
Thus, easier to create large-area OLEDs
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Organic LED Arrays Pros and Cons
OLED pros: Transparent Flexible Light-emitting, and quite bright (daylight visible) Large viewing angle Fast (< 1 microsecond off-on-off) Can be made large or small
OLED cons: Not quite there yet (96x64 displays…) Not very robust, display lifetime a key issue
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Traditional Input Device (1/4)
Commonly used today Mouse-like devices
mouse wheel mouse trackball
Keyboards
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Pen-based devices pressure sensitive absolute positioning tablet computers
IPAQ, WinCE machines Microsoft eTablet
coming soon palm-top devices
Handspring Visor, PalmOS™
Traditional Input Device (2/4)
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Traditional Input Device (3/4)
Joysticks game pads flightsticks Touchscreens
Microphones wireless vs. wired headset
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Traditional Input Device (4/4)
Digital still and video cameras, scanners
MIDI devices input from electronic
musical instruments more convenient
than entering scores with just a mouse/keyboard
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3D Input Device (1/2)
Electromagnetic trackers can be attached to any head, hands, joints,
objects Polhemus FASTRAK™(used in Brown’s Cave)
Acoustic-inertial trackers Intersense IS-900
http://www.polhemus.com/ftrakds.htm http://www.isense.com/products/prec/is900/index.htm
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3D Input Device (2/2)
Gloves attach electromagnetic tracker to the hand
Pinch gloves contact between digits is a “pinch” gesture in CAVE, extended Fakespace PINCH™
gloves with extra contacts
http://www.fakespacelabs.com/products/pinch.html
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Video Output Devices (1/4)
Classification Stereo
head-mounted displays shutter glasses
Degree of immersion conventional desktop
screen walkup VR, semi-
immersive displays immersive virtual reality
http://robotics.aist-nara.ac.jp/equipments/E-equips/hmd.html
http://www.virtualresearch.com/index.html
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Video Output Devices (2/4)
Example of Immersive
Display Diffusion Tensor MRI
Brain Visualization at Brown University
http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/graphics/research/sciviz/brain/brain.html
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Video Output Devices (3/4)
Desktop Vector display CRT LCD flatpanel workstation displays(Sun Lab) PC and Mac laptops Tablet computers Wacom’s display tablet http://www.wacom.com/productinfo/index.cfm
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Video Output Devices (4/4)
Immersive Head-mounted displays (HMD) Stereo shutter glasses Virtual Retinal Display (VRD) CAVE™
http://www.evl.uic.edu/research/template_res_project.php3?indi=27
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Interactive Input Devices
A graphics work station commonly has one or two monitors and a range of input devices. These can include:
Other deviceGraphics tablet MouseLight pen JoystickButton devices Dials and levers3D locators Touch panelsVoice Input Scanners
KeyboardMay be customized to application. Can include dials, joysticks.
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Hard Copy Devices
Printers Non-Impact printers --- Ink jet; laser; Xerographic; Electrostatic; Dye sublimation.
Plotters Flatbed, Beltbed Multiple pens available Plotter `languages’ Built in character sets, line styles etc.
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Hardcopy Technologies
Basically printing on paper, film etc. Some general issues are: The resolution of a device is the closest spacing at whi
ch adjacent black and white lines can be distinguished. Many devices work by producing (colored) dots, and im
age quality vs. dot size or spot size is an issue. Resolution can be no greater than addressability (lines
per inch) and depends on spot size also on intensity distribution across spot.
Many devices can create only a few solid colors. Other colors must be produced by dither patterns.
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Raster Scan Display Systems
The various hardware architectures for providing graphics functionality differ on two axes Processing performed by specialized graphics hardwar
e. Simplest has only video controller. More complex systems use a graphics display processor with
varying functionality. Relationship of frame buffer to CPU memory architectu
re. Dual ported Accessible only to graphics controller Accessible only over main bus
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Video Controller
Problems with memory access { 50 ns pixel time (480 x 640 x 60 Hz) is shorter than typical 200 ns RAM cycle time. - Must fetch multiple pixels per access. - Can eat up a lot of memory bandwidth. - Can eat up a lot of main bus bandwidth if so organized.
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Simple Raster systems (1/2)
No special graphics processing except video controller. Two basic frame-buffer mappings.
Single ported frame buffer Passes video information
over system bus. Simple and flexible. Problems with bus conges
tion.
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Simple Raster systems (2/2)
Dual ported frame buffer:
Frame buffer in special, dual ported Video RAM.
Unloads bus. More expensive. Less exible.
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Systems with video processors (1/3 )
Makes sense to put special-purpose hardware close to video (speed, expense)
May do various scan conversion algorithms, pix moves, windowing, sometimes rotation of existing primitives
Commands such as Text, Move, Line, Polygon... 3D stuff as well - hidden surface removal, shading
, texture mapping. Various architectures.
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Systems with video processors (23/ )
Graphics processor has its local memory and manages the frame buffer and specialized graphics programs.
Typical architecture for "plug in" graphics cards.
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Systems with video processors (33/ )
Graphics processor is controlled via an instruction queue.
All data transferred between host memory and coprocessor memory must go through both CPU
Unimplemented algorithms may be slow, since host machine has no direct access to the frame buffer.
May be considerable communication overhead if coprocessor instruction registers are not memory mapped.
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Example: Voodoo
Voodoo chipset manufactured by 3Dfx, Inc. 3D-only graphics chipset. Card manufacturers would build cards
around Voodoo chip Came out in 1996 ... probably first
consumer-level 3D accelerator. Combined hardware (Voodoo chip) and
software (Direct3D/OpenGL/Glide) solution.
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Voodoo hardware
Features: Filled 45 Million pixels/s; 1 million triangles/s Hardware z buffer (16-bit). Perspective corrected Gouraud-shaded
texture-mapped triangles done in hardware. Alpha blending (allows transparency)
Software provided polygons, normals and textures, and did all the geometry (modelling, viewing) and lighting itself.
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Example: GeForce 256
Released in 1999. One chip solution; 2D and 3D support. 2D
includes MPEG-2 (DVD) decoder. RAM from 32MB-128MB GeForce GPU (graphics processing unit)
has 23 million transistors ... more than Intel PIII.
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Hardware features (1/2)
Still unique for PC board in that it does transformation and lighting in hardware. Means more CPU for game physics etc.
4-stage pipeline: Transformation Lighting Triangle setup & clipping Rasterisation
4 pipelines (16 units).
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Hardware features (2/2)
Hardware support for: Phong shaded texture-mapped polygons Bump mapping Cube environment mapping
480 Mpixels/s, 15 million polygon/s. Extremely fast. http://www.nvidia.com. Some very nice
white papers on T & L and cube enviromapping.
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GeForce 3
57 million transistor chip (Pentium 4 is ~40 million)
Released in April 2001. Programmability means it's really another
computer within your computer. Graphics hardware is moving at 3x Moore's
Law.
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Render farms
Closely related to Beowulf clusters
Idea: Use many tightly-coupled off-the-shelf machines to do rendering
Problem: Dividing the work But sometimes easy, e.g. one
frame per machine Example: Titanic water effects
used cluster of about 160 Alphas running Linux/NT.