Graphic cards are an integral part of any computer. If you are building a modern computer these days, it is one of the things that you are going to have to add to your computer because without that, you might not be able to get the experience that you want to go for.
However, a lot of the times, people don’t know how these graphic cards work, to begin with. This is strange; because on the one hand, you have such a complex component that allows you to handle complex tasks, as well as play games and do other tasks that are relying on the GPU, but at the same time, you have no idea how it works.
For starters, the images you see on your monitor are made out of tiny dots that are pixels, and there are millions of them on a screen in this very instance. Your compute has to decide what needs to be done with all the pixels there are, just so it can finally create and display an image on your screen.
To properly do this, the computer needs a translator, which could take binary data from the CPU and turn it into the picture you see. Unless you have a built-in graphics card, all of this translation is done on an external GPU that you have installed on your PC.
Graphic cards are known for doing complex jobs, but the principles and components that are used here are fairly simple and straightforward.
Think of your computer as an art department, when people working in the company want some artwork, they first send a request to the department. The department then decides on how the image is created and then is put on paper. The result is that you finally see an idea translated onto a piece of paper or a canvas as an image.
A graphics card works a lot like that. The CPU works in tandem with the applications that send information about the image to the graphics card. The graphics card then decides how to use the pixels on the screen to create the image, and then sends the information to the monitor through the cable that you have used to attach both.
With that said, creating an image out of binary data is not something easy; it is, by every mean, a demanding process. To make a 3D image, the graphics card first needs to create a wireframe out of straight lines. Then, it proceeds to rasterize the image. It also goes on to add lighting, texture, and colour. For fast-paced video games, a computer has to go through this process about sixty times per second to create sixty frames per second. However, modern monitors go as high as 300Hz, which means that the computer has to process the information up to 300 times a second to push out the frames.
Without a graphics card that is there to perform these calculations, the workload would be a lot for a computer to handle, and that is why built-in graphics cards are often not powerful enough for this.
What Components Does the Graphics Card Use
It is important to know that a GPU does not work on its own. It has to work in tandem with other components as well, and we are going to talk about how these components work in conjunction with one and the other.
- Motherboard: This is, of course, to have a connection and power.
- Processor: The processor decides what needs to be done with each pixel on the screen.
- Memory: This holds information about each pixel and temporary store the completed frames.
- Monitor: Provides an output of the final result
All of these components work with each other to make the graphics card do the job and that is how things are going to work. It is not rocket science but we do hope that this clears out the overall user experience for a lot of people.
Conclusion
Graphic cards are a lot more important than one might think and often the working of these is something that people don’t think much about but we tried our best to make it easier for everyone to understand.
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