Semiconductor Essay Example For Students

Semiconductor Essay I PURPOSE OF REPORT This report will compare Voodoo5 5500 with NVIDIAs Geforce2 Ultra to determine which accelerator provides the best performance. Both companies accelerators share the same goal, to bring the highest visual quality possible. Although both companies share the same goal, their approaches are extremely different. Cost will also be addressed. The following features will be examined: Dual 3dfx VSA-100 T-Buffering Fill Rate 32-bit Z-Buffer/Stencil Synchronous dynamic random access memory 32-bit Color II 3D IMAGING 3D objects are created by connecting two-dimensional polygons. Objects appear to be 3D dimensional because the computer calculates the necessary angles to give the illusion of depth. The computer then assigns a give texture to each object, textures are the covering of the object. Like in the real world, different textures have different properties, like color, luster, opaque, etc. These objects are then displayed on the computers monitor. Many 3D objects can be combined to create a 3D environment. A 3D environment is the computers generation of a make believe world. When the camera, the point of view within the 3D world, moves, the computer calculates the height, width, depth and the lighting of every object and adjust them in way that from the perspective of the camera, you appear to be moving within the environment. What is 3D? The first dimension is a line. The second dimension, a plane. This world is described vertically and horizontally. This is what you draw on a piece of paper. The third dimension, our dimension, allows free movement and perception by adding depth. This allows movement in all directions, up, down, left, right, forwards and back. All personal computers come pre-installed with a two-dimensional (2D) graphics board the hardware that creates the computer screen graphics for flat applications like Microsoft Word and Excel. But, to make 3D images in real-time (or on-the-fly), a computer must make millions of complex mathematical calculations every second. This can make games and 3D graphics applications slow and jerky as the computer gets caught up rendering 3D images in addition to running the program. 3D accelerators solve this problem. When you install a 3D accelerator, the 3D graphics previously rendered by the CPU (your computers processor) are now rendered by the 3D accelerator. This significantly increases the performance, visual effects, and drastically improves the 3D experience. III VOODOO5 5500 The Voodoo5 5500 is 3Dfxs latest 3D accelerator. The card features dual 3dfx VSA-100 chips, Real-Time Full-Scene HW Anti-Aliasing, the exclusive T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effects engine, Z-Buffer/Stencil, 32-bit Z-Buffer/Stencil, 64MB of graphics memory, 32-bit color. Dual 3dfx VSA-100 3D objects are broken down into primitive polygons using triangles. The 3D processor(s) then use primitive polygons to perform calculations (Z-Buffering, FFSAA, etc.) The Voodoo5 5500 duel VSA-100 chips are able to process 11 million triangles a second. T-Buffering Basically, T-Buffer technology renders numerous copies of the same scene. The copies are then merged and output to the video. This process dramatically increased the quality of the images displayed. They appear smooth without spatial artifacts . Most 3D cards on the market use some form of FSAA but the 3Dfxs T-Buffering has other important features like depth-of-field blur. When humans look at things, our eyes focus on the object that we are looking at and not its surroundings. This is why in real life, the only object we can truly see clearly is the object focussed on. In current 3D games, however, there is no depth of field; everything is rendered with perfect clarity regardless of how close our virtual eyes are supposed to be. Currently many game developers deal with this issue by using a fog effect, so objects that are farther away are blurrier. However, this does not look real since the fog obscures and fades the colors of the distant. With the T-buffer, depth of field is a reality, making rendered images much more realistic. The T-Buffer has two other abilities: soft shadows and soft reflections. Shadows and reflections in frames that pass through the T-Buffer look more realistic. Voodoo5 5500 uses T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effects engine smoothes motion and improve image quality or to exaggerate motion for special effects. This technology powers the cards most important attribute, Real-Time Full-Scene Hardware Anti-Aliasing (FSAA). Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) is the removal of aliasing artifacts. Aliasing artifacts come in two forms: jaggies, or stairstepping of diagonal lines, and flashing or popping of very thin polygons. A persons desires and behavior toward selecting a Essay That may not seem very important for one sphere, but because hundreds to thousands of objects are often displayed in scenes, without a GPU those objects have to share the limited processing power of the CPU, forcing software developers to budget processing tasks. Now with an NVIDIA GPU transform calculations are offloaded from the CPU, allowing more detailed objects with higher polygon counts to be processed more quickly. With transformation a jungle scene can have lots of trees and bushesrather than just a single treeand each tree can consist of many leaves created by thousands of polygons. Since the GPU relieves the CPU of the burden of calculating the transforms, you will be able to view scenes rich with complex objects that look real and move like their real-life counterparts. Not only will the objects and characters be complex, but many more can exist. How does lighting work? The human eye is more sensitive to changes in brightness than it is to changes in colorwhich means that an image with lighting effects communicates more information to a viewer more efficiently. The discrete lighting engine on an NVIDIA GPU calculates distance vectors from lights to objects and from objects to a viewers eyes within 3D scenes. Lighting calculations are an effective way to add both subtle and not-so-subtle changes in brightness to 3D objects in a manner that mimics real-world lighting conditions. 32-bit Z-Buffer/Stencil The GeForce2 Ultra uses 32-bit Z-Buffer/Stencil technology . Double Data Rate The GeForce2 Ultra most notable feature is its speed. The card features 64MB of Double Data Rate SGRAM (DDR). DDR allows for data to be fetched on both the rising and falling edges of the clock thus doubling the effective transfer rate of the clock, the ability at which the memory is able to collected by processor. The 64MB of DDR has a clock speed of 233MHZ, but because of its ability to send information on the rising and falling edges of the clock it really has a clock speed of 466MHz. 32-bit Color 250MHz GeForce processor supports full 32-bit color accuracy. 250MHz GeForce processor has a maximum 2D rendering ability 2048 pixels by 2048 pixels. Analysis Both cards are powered by different technologies and different chip sets but with the same fundamental goal: to give the best 3D experience possible. The best 3D experience is when you run at a very high resolution with a very high fill rate and with a large number of frames per second (over 60 frames per second (fps) is ideal). In order to determine which card is superior both are installed on identical computers. Each card runs the same 3D program while measurements are taken at different resolutions. The attached charts compare the two 3d accelerators at different resolutions. The charts demonstrate the frames per second at different resolutions. At higher resolutions the GeForce2 Ultra is a smoother performer and provides a more realistic 3d experience. VI CONCLUSION The GeForce2 Ultra outperforms the Voodoo5 5500 in all aspects. VII COST Retail cost for the two accelerators in Toronto, Canada (in Canadian dollars)is: GeForce2 Ultra: $639. 00 Voodoo5 5500: $450.00 Bibliography Work Sited 1. www.3dfx. com 2. Greg Vederman. NVIDIA unleashes the new GeForce 2 Ultra. PC Gamer Volume 7, Number 11. November 2000 3. Lizotte , Eric. V5 5500. http://www. ga-hardware.com/review.cfm?id=v5pci 4. NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra: Worlds Fastest GPU. http://www.nvidia.com/products/geforce2ultra.nsf 5. Greg Vederman. The New Voodoos. PC Gamer Volume 7, Number 2. February 2000 6. Price Check Future Shop (353 Yonge St, (416) 971-5377 7. Shimpi , Anand Lal. NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra. http://www. anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1298p=1 8. Synchronous dynamic random access memory. www.whatis.com http://whatis.techtarget. com/WhatIs_Definition_Page/0,4152,214193,00.html 9. Texel. www. whatis.com. http://whatis.techtarget. com/WhatIs_Search_Results_Exact/1,282033,,00.html?query=texel 10. Transform and Lighting with an NVIDIA GPU. http://www. nvidia.com/Products/geforce2ultra.nsf/second.html 11. Tseng, Jeffrey. 3dfx Revisited. http://www.hardwarecentral. com/hardwarecentral/previews/1646/4/ 12. White, Ron. How Computers Work Millennium Edition. Indianapolis: Que#61666; Corporation, 1999.