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Objectives
Explain how video displays work
CRT and LCD monitors
Understand the concept of resolution
Explain refresh rates and how they affect monitors
Select the proper video Card
Graphics Processor
Video Memory
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Introduction
The term video encompasses a complex interaction
among numerous parts of PC, all designed to put a
picture on the screen.
Video consists of two devices—the video card
(display adapter)
and the monitor
(Video displays)
Monitor Video card
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Video Card
The video card consists of two distinct components
One takes commands from the computer and updates its
own onboard RAM
The other scans the RAM and sends data to the monitor
Therefore Video card : handles all communications
between CPU and monitor.
OS needs to know how to handle communication
between CPU and display adapter, which requires
BIOS. 4
Monitors
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CRT Monitors
◼ CRTis Cathode Ray Tube (CRT), which is type of a
vacuum tube.
◼ One end of this tube is a
slender cylinder that
consists of three
electron guns.
◼ The wide end of the
CRT is the display screen.
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CRT Monitors
◼ The inside of the display screen has Phosphor coating.
◼ When power is applied to one or
more of the electron guns,
a stream of electrons shoots
towards the display end of CRT.
◼ This stream is subjected to a magnetic field generated by a
ring of electromagnets called a yoke
◼ that controls the electron beams point of impact.
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CRT Monitors
◼ The phosphor coating releases energy as visible light
when struck by the electrons.
◼ Phosphors continue to glow momentarily after being
struck by electron beams—quality of phosphors is
called persistence
◼ Too much persistence and the image is smeary
◼ Too little persistence and the image appears to flicker.
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CRT Refresh Rates
Video data is displayed on the monitor starting at the upper-left
corner of the monitor ending to the lower- right corner. Each line
are called raster line. How many line in screen?
◼ Horizontal refresh rate (HRR) ◼ Vertical refresh rate (VRR)
◼ The speed at which the ◼ The amount of time taken by
electron beam moves across the monitor to draw the
the screen and to be ready for entire screen and get the
the next line. electron beam back to the
start.
CRT Refresh Rates
◼ The Monitor does not determine the HRR or VRR.
◼ Video cardspush the monitor at a given VRR, and
then the monitor determines the HRR
◼ If the VRR is set too low, you’ll see flicker
◼ If it is set too high, you’ll
have a distorted screen image
and may damage the monitor.
◼ Multisync (multiple-frequency monitor) monitors
support multiple VRRs.
Phosphors
◼ Phosphors are dots inside the CRT
monitor that glow red, green, or
blue when an electron gun sweeps
over them.
◼ CRT has three electron guns one
for read Phosphor, one for green
Phosphors and one for blue
Phosphors.
◼ Thehigher the intensity of the electron stream the
higher the color produced by Phosphors. 12
Phosphors
◼ How we can prevent the red electron beam from
“bleeding over” and lighting neighboring blue and
green dots?
◼ Shadow mask is a screen that
enables only the proper
electron gun to light the proper
phosphor.
◼ The area of phosphors lit at one time by a group of
guns is called a picture element, or pixel
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Phosphors
Triad
◼ A pixel consists of at least 3 phosphor dots
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Resolution
◼ Resolution is always shown as the number of
Horizontal Pixel times the Vertical Pixel.
◼ A resolution of 640 X 480 means:
◼ Number of horizontal pixel is 640 and vertical pixel is 480.
◼ If you multiply the values together you get 307200? What does
it means?
◼ Resolution affecting the pixel
size.
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Common Resolutions
◼ 640x480 = 307,200 pixels per screen
◼ 800x600
◼ 1024x768
◼ 1280x960
◼ 1280x1024
◼ 1600x1200
◼ Most of these resolutions matches a 4:3 ratio (called
aspect ratio)
◼ Many monitors (wide-screen monitors) have 16:9 or
16:10 ratio. Ex. 1366x768 and 1920x1200
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Resolution
➢ Maximum possible resolution:
Determined by how small can one pixel be.
➢ Theoretically,
a triad, but various limitations in
screens, controlling electronics, and electron
gun technology make smallest pixel much
bigger than one triad.
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Dot Pitch
◼ Dot pitch—diagonal distance between
phosphorous dots of the same color.
◼ Range from 0.39 mm to as low as 0.18 mm
◼ Thelower the dot pitch, the more dots across the
screen, which produces a sharper, more defined
image
LCD monitors
Use Liquid crystal displays
Have many advantage over
CRT:
Thinner and lighter.
Much less power.
Flicker free.
No harmful radiation.
Called flat panels or flat
panel displays .
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Video Cards
Video cards are composed of two major pieces :
Video RAM to store video image.
Video processor- GPU which takes information
from video RAM and shoots it out to the
monitor.
Video card need fan to cool their onboard
processor.
Monitor plugs into the
video card.
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Color depth
Each pixel in screen has color
This color are stored in video RAM using tiny
number of bits depend on the number of color
you want.
i.e. to get 256 colors, each pixel would have to be
represented with 8 bits.
Color depths determined by bits per pixel
2 colors = 1 bit (mono)
4 colors = 2 bits
16 colors = 4 bits
256 colors = 8 bits
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Color depth
Windows XP offers 32-bit color.
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Video RAM Requirements
Depends on Resolution + Colour Depth
Example: 1024 x 768 = 786432 pixels per screen
32 bit colour = 4 bytes per pixel.
4 x 786432 = 3145728 bytes.
= 3 megabytes per screen.
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Video Modes
Your video card and monitor are capable of
showing Windows in a fixed number of different
resolutions and color depths.
The choices depend on the resolutions and color
depths the video card can push to the monitor and
the amount of bandwidth your monitor can
support.
Any single combination of resolution and color
depth you set for your system is called a mode.
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Video Modes
VGA Video Graphics Array
Supported 640 x 480 pixels and 16 Color.
Every video card made in the last 15 years can
Output as VGA, but VGA-only cards are now
obsolete. Check Your PC?
Minimum display requirement by many
software package.
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Video Modes
Beyond VGA
SVGA, XGA, and more
Mode Resolution Aspect Typical Device
ratio
QVGA 320x240 4:3 PDA and small video player
SVGA 800x600 4:3 Small monitors
XGA 1024x768 4:3 Monitor and portable
projector
WXGA 1280x800 16:10 Small widescreen laptop
SXGA 1280x1024 5:4 LCD monitors
WSXGA 1440x900 16:10 Widescreen laptop
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Motherboard connection
Data moving from video card to display has to
go through the video card’s memory chips and
expansion bus and this can happen only so
quickly.
PCI, AGP, PCIe
The standard PCI slot transfers 32 bits at speed
33 Mhz, yielding a max. bandwidth of 132 MBps.
This may be enough until you use higher
resolution, higher color depth and higher
refresh rate. 28
Motherboard connection
A typical display at 800x600 with 70 HZ refresh
rate and 8 bit color depth. How much data per
second has to be sent to the display?
800 x 600 x 1 byte x 70 = 33.6 MBps.
Using 24-bit color, the amount of data sent jumps
to 100.8 MBps.
Although 132 MBps of PCI looks sufficient, but
most systems have more than one PCI device each
requiring part of this throughput.
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AGP
◼ Intel answered the desire for video bandwidth
even higher than PCI with Accelerated Graphics
Port (AGP)
◼ AGP: a single special port similar to PCI slot
dedicated to video.
◼ It is derived from the 66-MHz, 32- bit PCI 2.1 spec.
◼ It uses a function called strobing that increases
the signals 2, 4, and 8 times for each clock cycle
(called AGP x1, x2, x4, x8)
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AGP cont.
◼ AGP has several technological advantages over
PCI:
◼ It resides alone on its own personal data bus connected
directly to Northbridge.
◼ It takes advantages of pipelining commands similar to
CPU pipelining.
◼ It has a feature called sidebanding: a second data bus
that enables video card to send more commands to
northbridge while receiving others at same time.
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Accelerated Graphics Port
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PCIe
◼ PCIe developed to replace PCI and AGP.
◼ PCI and AGP are using a parallel interface.
◼ It is a naturalevolution for video as it is incredibly
fast, using serial communication method.
◼ All PCIe video cards use PCIe x16 connector
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Graphics Processor
• Graphics Processor Unit (GPU)
• The most important decision in buying a video
card is the graphics processor and amount of RAM
onboard.
• The graphics processor handles the heavy lifting of
taking commands from the CPU and translating
them into coordinates and color information that
the monitor understands and displays.
Graphics Processor
• Most video processors are made by:
– NVIDIA
– ATI
• ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512 MB
– ATI Manufacturer
– Radeon X1950 XTX Processor & Model No.
– 512 MB Amount of RAM
Graphics Processor
• NVIDIA and ATI release multiple models of
graphics processors each year
• Most features only seen in 3-D games
– Textures
– Transparency
– Shadows
– Reflection
Video Memory
• Video RAM constantly updates to reflect every
change that takes place on the screen
• Different video modes require different amount of
memory.
• DRAM slower but cheaper
• VRAM is specialized Video RAM
• more expensive but faster. It can read and write
data at same time
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Video Memory
• WRAM (Window RAM) is slightly faster than
VRAM but not as widely accepted
• SGRAM (synchronous graphics RAM) is sync-ed
to the system clock
• Now DDR SDRAM is used.
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