GPUs. What?,Why? and How?

Hey there this is Aman and you are on SciTech Revel.

So today we will be discussing about GPUs or so-called graphics card.

Let’s start with full form – GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit. As the name suggests it is a processing unit for graphics. So, what does it processes?

To view a image a monitor has to turn on and off variable arrays(pixels) at some rate which may be described as No. of times a pixel is turned on or off in a second. You may have witnessed it written on your monitor box it looks something like 60Hz or 70Hz.

Here that Hertz define the no. of times a pixel is called by the processor.

A picture is also defined by its resolution; that resolution suggests the grid that particular picture file uses to show you an image. Resolutions of an image are encoded into the meta data of your image file, the image viewer program extracts data from that and calculates it to use a grid of pixels available on the monitor to show that.

Moving on to playing videos, when ever a video is played there arises a need for complex image processing.

Videos are actually a series of images being shown after a defined time interval. In videos we have predefined calculations available to show every detail. Actually, a pixel needs to be programmed to show a specific intensity of colour being used in the image. Thus, a video file have its processed data part stored in the file data itself so that it can be used in any device, with better encoding techniques even simple microprocessor too can play a High-Definition Video.

The name High-Definition Itself states it has a well-defined data in itself and that is the reason for bigger file sizes for better quality of videos.

Till now graphics Processing was not visible. Actually, for better quality a better processing of data is required. And that is the reason “Why low-end Phones do not come with better camera.” Even if they come they include image optimization techniques to lower the CPU load.

Now what about playing games? Do makers know what series of event we are going to use in the game? The answer is no!!

Even if they did know about it, think about the size of the game with better graphics!!

So, the solution is predefined information about graphics (when a certain event is triggered what graphics to show).

So how to use this information to make games like a real video being played? The answer is real time graphics processing.

If processor was to do all this then it will stop other important processes to perform graphics processing but that is not nice, so processor companies introduced a separate processor to process graphics and to reduce load on main CPU.

Graphics processing is lot like solving some complex Physics problem and hence a processor even better than main CPU and hell lot of primary memory to process faster is needed.

That is why integrated graphics are ineffective when compared to dedicated graphics processor or GPUs.

That is all about GPUs. HOPE YOU LIKE IT.