Working of Graphic Card

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You might all love to play games in your PCs just as I always love to. Games occupying  less space in memory and low resolutions  are easily installable in your PCs but the bigger games like Crysis 2 , NFS Carbon, etc, have a very high resolution and a special requirement  is needed to play these types of games which is the  Graphics card .

Today, I am going to illustrate you about what all happens inside your GPU (Graphical processing unit) when you use the games like Crysis 2 exe file sitting on your desktop. The graphics card of Nvidia and AMD have slightly different pipelines, but all the processes and the stages that take place inside are roughly same in both with a unique tweak in the steps given below.

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Transformation:

In this stage, it involves the computing on vertex data i.e. there are points in 3-D spaces and here the conversion of numbers of 3-D space takes place into polygons in 2-D space. All this is based on the coordinates system and the objects are being placed relative to each other in what is a 2-D space, although the object remains 3-D.

Lighting   :

The polygons or the points that we get from the first step are then lit correctly as the appearance will be based on their position and the number of the light sources and the reflective surfaces.

Viewpoint:

Now the user point of view or the orientation is taken into account. The objects which are closer will appear larger and vice versa and on the basis of the orientation all the objects in the scene will be manipulated.

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Clipping:

In this stage, the objects which are not visible to the user are pruned off or removed in the process of clipping. This saves the GPU precious computation power as the calculations of the objects which are not viewable in the scene is not necessarily needed to be done.

 Triangle Setup:

The objects or the shapes which are very complex are made by joining of the vertex points and thus create  multi-sided wireframe models as when seen in 3-D scenes.

Rasterization:

Now the objects are being assigned to pixels i.e. the pixels for an object are being fixed accordingly. In other words we can explain it in the way as the scene will be visualized as it would be on your monitor- a bunch of 2-D pixels.

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Culling:

In the stage, the pixels which are not visible or the non-viewable pixels are removed. This can be actually considered as the second stage of culling after clipping.

Texture & Shading:

Lastly this stage involves the performing of the makeup job on each pixel. In texture, a 2-D image is added to the surface of a 3-D object giving it a realistic look. Defining the properties such as color, texture and the depth effect to a pixel is all done by a pixel shader. Pixel shader gives the object a special appearance that mimics reality.

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