How Graphics Cards Work

 

Ever since 3dfx debuted the original Voodoo accelerator, no single piece of equipment in a PC has had as much of an impact on whether your machine could game as the humble graphics card. While other components absolutely matter, a top-end PC with 32GB of RAM, a $500 CPU, and PCIe-based storage will choke and die if asked to run modern AAA titles on a ten year-old card at modern resolutions and detail levels. Graphics cards (also commonly referred to as GPUs, or graphics processing units) are critical to game performance and we cover them extensively. But we don’t often dive into what makes a GPU tick and how the cards function.

 

What’s a GPU?

 

A GPU is a device with a set of specific hardware capabilities that are intended to map well to the way that various 3D engines execute their code, including geometry setup and execution, texture mapping, memory access, and shaders. There’s a relationship between the way 3D engines function and the way GPU designers build hardware. Some of you may remember that AMD’s HD 5000 family used a VLIW5 architecture, while certain high-end GPUs in the HD 6000 family used a VLIW4 architecture. With GCN, AMD changed its approach to parallelism, in the name of extracting more useful performance per clock cycle. Nvidia first coined the term “GPU” with the launch of the original GeForce 256 and its support for performing hardware transform and lighting calculations on the GPU (this corresponded, roughly to the launch of Microsoft’s DirectX 7).