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Speaker 1: It's ready, are you hey there? Tech stuff listeners, This
Speaker 1: is Jonathan Strickland, and I wanted to talk to you
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Speaker 1: see what you got. Get in touch with technology with
Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette
Speaker 1: and I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me, as is senior writer Jonathan he there,
Speaker 1: and I want to warn you all today's episode maybe
Speaker 1: graphic that's correct, it's about graphics cards. We have received
Speaker 1: lots of questions and requests for us to do an
Speaker 1: episode about graphics cards, some of which hounded us through
Speaker 1: multiple forms of media. And so today you get your wish,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about graphics cards. These are the things
Speaker 1: that got me into console gaming, which is true. No, So, Chris,
Speaker 1: you and I remember, I mean we were we were
Speaker 1: both using computers during the nineties when there was the
Speaker 1: kind of revolution in personal computers where and a a
Speaker 1: an independent secondary graphics card became a necessity if you
Speaker 1: wanted to stay up to date with the latest games
Speaker 1: that were coming out. Yeah. I remember with my very
Speaker 1: first Amiga how they would talk about there were their
Speaker 1: secondary chips on the motherboard that we handle additional operations,
Speaker 1: not just the one processor. And I think, um, it
Speaker 1: probably seems silly to a lot of us now, like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: of course you know that would be important. But you know,
Speaker 1: as computing has gone on, we've realized some that although
Speaker 1: you have you know, Moore's law, which basically just you know,
Speaker 1: talks about computing power growing exponentially, and you say, well, okay,
Speaker 1: you know you've got more and more powerful computers, but
Speaker 1: we've realized over that time too that although you may
Speaker 1: have more powerful processors, Dividing tasks up between multiple processors
Speaker 1: is a better way to compute because you can accomplish
Speaker 1: more when you divide these jobs, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's more efficient that way. It's it's very simple. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So a graphics card job essentially is to really manipulate
Speaker 1: computer memory at a very rapid rate so that information
Speaker 1: coming in can be converted into graphic information that's going
Speaker 1: to be displayed upon a monitor of some sort. And
Speaker 1: it's almost its own computer. Yeah, it's it's it's its
Speaker 1: own processor, certainly. And the idea is that this takes
Speaker 1: some of that burden from the CPU and it shoulders
Speaker 1: it itself so that the CPU can um sort of
Speaker 1: become like a manager. The CPU sends the instructions to
Speaker 1: the GPU, which then takes care of calculations and and
Speaker 1: it's it's designed to do that in a very streamlined,
Speaker 1: fast way. And part of that design is this idea
Speaker 1: of parallelism, which is what Chris was talking about, where
Speaker 1: you have your your chip created in such a way
Speaker 1: to process sets of instructions in parallel with each other
Speaker 1: because those different sets of instructions don't depend directly on
Speaker 1: each other. You know, if you think about computer problem.
Speaker 1: One type of computer problem could be an ongoing uh
Speaker 1: calculation where the outcome of the previous calculation determines what
Speaker 1: the next calculation will be. Right, So we'll just say
Speaker 1: that for the first calculation, we're gonna do something really simple.
Speaker 1: Just for example, say that the first calculation is two
Speaker 1: plus two and the the output is four, and then
Speaker 1: the four from that first calculation is used in the
Speaker 1: second calculation. Where you have another variable, Well, we'll say
Speaker 1: that for the purposes of this problem, that variable is
Speaker 1: going to be eight, and whatever the product the whatever
Speaker 1: the sum is from that first calculation gets added to eight.
Speaker 1: So the the second calculation depends upon the outcome of
Speaker 1: the first one. The two plus two is four. Well,
Speaker 1: now I've got the the sum of that first calculation four.
Speaker 1: I can now add that to eight to get twelve,
Speaker 1: and so on and so forth. Well, with all those
Speaker 1: calculations depending upon one another, having a single processor makes sense.
Speaker 1: You can't really divide that up because you don't know
Speaker 1: what the outcome is going to be of a previous calculation,
Speaker 1: so you can't move forward until you get that. But
Speaker 1: there are other computer problems which we have talked about
Speaker 1: several times on this podcast that you can divide up
Speaker 1: because they are not interdependent that way, and have a
Speaker 1: processor or several processors work on that problem, on those problems,
Speaker 1: and the outcome ends up creating whatever it is you
Speaker 1: need and UM. In that case, the GPU design was
Speaker 1: meant to do that. So we had parallel processors with
Speaker 1: GPUs well before you started seeing multi cores in consumer computers. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. By the way, if you run across computers
Speaker 1: that offer perpendicular processing, I don't recommend it they I
Speaker 1: wasted a lot of money once anyway, being so obtuse UM. Actually,
Speaker 1: when you look at the parts of a graphics card,
Speaker 1: UM again, they seem rather you know common sense. You've
Speaker 1: got a graphics card is its own motherboard, It has
Speaker 1: a its own processor on it, UM, and its own memory. UM.
Speaker 1: You may actually see, you know, specifications, I remember seeing
Speaker 1: specifications for how much v RAM, video RAM or or
Speaker 1: graphics memory. UM. That's all part of what you see
Speaker 1: on the graphics card. And some graphics cards are you know, customizable.
Speaker 1: You can you can add memory. UM depends on your
Speaker 1: computer course, and and all of that also depends on
Speaker 1: your your the type of graphics card you use depends
Speaker 1: heavily upon the kind of motherboard your computer has. That's true.
Speaker 1: That's true. Not all motherboards can support all graphics cards.
Speaker 1: It depends on especially if you have an older computer.
Speaker 1: There comes a point with older computers where the newest
Speaker 1: video cards just the old motherboards can't support them. So
Speaker 1: that's one thing to keep in mind that the motherboard
Speaker 1: your your computer's motherboard has a you know, a shelf
Speaker 1: life really and at some point it does become obsolete,
Speaker 1: at least in comparison to the latest hardware that comes
Speaker 1: or the latest components that are out on the market.
Speaker 1: And basically, uh, well, I can't think of a computer
Speaker 1: that doesn't have a video output of some kind on it,
Speaker 1: even even laptops or ultra books, you know, things that
Speaker 1: that are designed to have fewer ports than things because
Speaker 1: it's streamlined. Even those machines generally have UM some kind
Speaker 1: of video output. Of course, the main one on those
Speaker 1: would be at their own screen, but um coming off
Speaker 1: of the graphics card. You need to uh to be
Speaker 1: able to display the results, so you know, they'll they'll
Speaker 1: generally have some kind of connector UM and of course,
Speaker 1: key to this all is your operating system, because your
Speaker 1: operating system is uh, what is doing basically the traffic management.
Speaker 1: So let's say, uh, probably the main reason we talk
Speaker 1: about graphics cards these days are for you know, really
Speaker 1: three things games, um, high resolution video editing or or
Speaker 1: you know, graphics photo editing. You know, those are the
Speaker 1: reasons we really talk about the graphics card. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you say, yeah, I've got to surf the web
Speaker 1: on my computer, you don't go, yeah, but what kind
Speaker 1: of graphics card you got, man? I will add I
Speaker 1: will add a fourth a fourth yeah, which has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with graphics. Okay, it's what people have started
Speaker 1: to use GPUs to do. I figured we'd talked about
Speaker 1: that way, which goes back to the parallel processing. So
Speaker 1: the fourth one, I would say, is parallel processing that
Speaker 1: does not necessarily go back to video processing. So and
Speaker 1: that can be for lots of different stuff. I know
Speaker 1: specifically which one you're thinking about. But because we did
Speaker 1: our our episode on on password security and talked about
Speaker 1: how GPUs have been used to help crack passwords through
Speaker 1: brute force attacks, but they can also be is to
Speaker 1: do other parallel processing, not just you know, cryptography, No,
Speaker 1: that that's true because UM, well, actually uh we had
Speaker 1: talked about it on our our podcast about about the
Speaker 1: mac os ten snow Leopard. One of the changes was
Speaker 1: that they added the ability to uh um send instructions.
Speaker 1: And that's really what I was sort of getting at
Speaker 1: with the the operating system is, you know, it's let's
Speaker 1: say you're playing a game and uh you know, you
Speaker 1: have the game itself, the instructions that are going out
Speaker 1: about where your character is and where it's moving across
Speaker 1: the screen, and it's sending other instructions about how to
Speaker 1: render that on the screen to the graphics processor card,
Speaker 1: which takes care of computation for things like the number
Speaker 1: of polygons that you see on the screen, how fast
Speaker 1: those that information can be displayed. So they work in
Speaker 1: concert through the help of the operating system to uh
Speaker 1: manage the rest of the stuff and the graphics specific
Speaker 1: stuff with the two different the two different cars, and
Speaker 1: mac Os ten is able in the newer incarnations of
Speaker 1: the operating system is able to uh um, and I
Speaker 1: assume that's true for newer versions of Windows and Lenox
Speaker 1: as well as you know, able to send instructions to
Speaker 1: the graphics cards. So Let's say you are surfing the
Speaker 1: web and maybe you have a music playing on you know,
Speaker 1: music player service, and you've got email going on, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, five or ten other little things going on
Speaker 1: in the background, your calendar software. UM, your graphics card
Speaker 1: may not be working over time. So the processing uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the the operating system goes, hey, since you're
Speaker 1: not busy and you handle some of these other instructions,
Speaker 1: kind of take a load off this couch. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So it goes in and helps move the couch, um,
Speaker 1: so to speak, and take some of the load off
Speaker 1: the main processor, which which is ingenious that any operating
Speaker 1: system would be able to do that. Um, And it
Speaker 1: just so happens. I know about that one because we
Speaker 1: were talking about it in that But you know, the
Speaker 1: operating systems have become so much more sophisticated and to
Speaker 1: be able to take advantage of that specifically, UM, to
Speaker 1: take a load off of the main processors is excellent.
Speaker 1: The things that determine how fast a graphics card is, uh,
Speaker 1: it's more than just the GPU clock speed of the processors.
Speaker 1: So keep in mind the heart of this graphics card
Speaker 1: is a processor. We call the GPU. The graphics processing unit.
Speaker 1: And and it's it's very similar to a CPU. I
Speaker 1: mean that it's job is to crunch data. It's just
Speaker 1: in this case most of the time that data has
Speaker 1: to do with rendering graphics. UM, so the clock speed
Speaker 1: is definitely important. And clock speed, of course, that's generally speaking,
Speaker 1: the number of instructions a CPU can carry out within
Speaker 1: a second. Uh, that's the number of cycles. Because keeping
Speaker 1: in mind that when I say instruction, really instruct it's
Speaker 1: really cycles, and some instructions require multiple cycles to complete.
Speaker 1: I want to make sure I get that before people
Speaker 1: are like, well, you know actually, and people are going
Speaker 1: to mention the fact that processors can be overclocked or underclocked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that speed is a rating that the manufacturer gives
Speaker 1: it that basically says, this will operate the way we've
Speaker 1: set it up on this board. It will operate at
Speaker 1: this speed it's gonna and it's a safe speed. It's
Speaker 1: not going to cause the processor, processor to overheat falls.
Speaker 1: It falls within certain operating parameters that are considered to
Speaker 1: be optimal for that system. So yeah, it's the rated speed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just like CPUs, you can overclock GPUs aboutely want to.
Speaker 1: In fact, there are a lot of video gamers out there,
Speaker 1: that's what they do. Uh. So that's one thing that
Speaker 1: determines how fast a video graphics card is able to
Speaker 1: handle graphics. But that's not the only thing, because you
Speaker 1: also have to worry about getting information to and from
Speaker 1: that uh that that processor. So the size of the
Speaker 1: memory bus is really important. The memory bus this is
Speaker 1: kind of you can think of that is sort of
Speaker 1: like the highway between the memory and the processor. And
Speaker 1: you want a nice wide highway so that you can
Speaker 1: shove as much data towards that processor as possible. Because
Speaker 1: the processor, if it's really fast and is able to
Speaker 1: handle a lot of instructions, that doesn't matter so much.
Speaker 1: If it can't get the data it needs fast enough,
Speaker 1: it may just be that, yeah, I'm super smart, but
Speaker 1: you're giving me math problems at a rate that is,
Speaker 1: you know, nowhere near my capacity, and so a lot
Speaker 1: of this power is going to waste. So the memory
Speaker 1: bus is a very important part of that equation, you know,
Speaker 1: because you you you said the memory buses. It's like well,
Speaker 1: and and that's the funny part about that is if
Speaker 1: you're thinking about it in terms if that if you
Speaker 1: made that visual connection to it's not um it really is.
Speaker 1: The bus is the connection itself, not because I was
Speaker 1: actually thinking of bus and what in the term given
Speaker 1: in my in the right context, not in the vehicular
Speaker 1: one I want. But also other things that that determine
Speaker 1: the speed include the amount of available memory, so that
Speaker 1: onboard memory that's on that graphics card plays a big part.
Speaker 1: That's just that's just as true in your computer for
Speaker 1: general computing purposes. You know, your computer needs a good
Speaker 1: amount of memory, so the CPU does not have to
Speaker 1: constantly look for the information within your systems hard drive.
Speaker 1: That slows things down. So keeping more and more data
Speaker 1: in memory means the CPU doesn't have to consult the
Speaker 1: hard drive so much and things just move at a
Speaker 1: faster clip. Very important when you're rendering graphics, because you know,
Speaker 1: you want to be able to render graphics at a
Speaker 1: really good speed. Humans like in general twenty five frames
Speaker 1: per second. That's a good speed for us. It's hard
Speaker 1: for us to detect uh problems at anything that's faster
Speaker 1: than that. But for high you know, really action oriented
Speaker 1: video games with lots of high speed stuff. Stick Steve
Speaker 1: frames per second is generally considered, that's your goal. You
Speaker 1: want to hit sixty frames per second because you're not
Speaker 1: going to have too much blurring or artifacts or other
Speaker 1: problems if you're able to display information at that speed
Speaker 1: and uh and so that's really important as well. The
Speaker 1: memory clock rate is also important. Memory bandwidth um and uh.
Speaker 1: If you're using an ancient system, ramdack speed. So ramdack
Speaker 1: that's uh. When when the process is handling this information,
Speaker 1: it's all digital, right, it's all ones and zeros. Some
Speaker 1: of us who have older computer systems may have display
Speaker 1: that's not digital. We might have an analog display, which
Speaker 1: means you have to convert those signals from digital to analog.
Speaker 1: That's what the ram dex job is. But these days
Speaker 1: most displays are digital. If you were to go out
Speaker 1: and buy a system now, it would be it would
Speaker 1: have a digital display. Analog just doesn't really that's not
Speaker 1: a thing anymore. So it's really for people who have
Speaker 1: older systems they would have to worry about the ram
Speaker 1: dag issue. In fact, I'm sure that it's being phased
Speaker 1: out of almost everything at this point because I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, why would you be using this older monitor
Speaker 1: when you could go out and get a new display.
Speaker 1: Tune in this week is Captain Atomic takes on the
Speaker 1: evil of ram Dak. Yeah, yeah, different different Ramdackum you
Speaker 1: will phase him out. So and like you were saying that,
Speaker 1: the job of this is to to to the the
Speaker 1: job that we were intending graphics cards to do, I
Speaker 1: should say, was to render graphics. And uh so like
Speaker 1: the polygon issue, that's generally speaking, it tends to be
Speaker 1: triangles a second, and uh and and these these little
Speaker 1: bit tiny triangles are what make up the various surfaces
Speaker 1: you see in represented in computer graphics. Yeah, we're talking
Speaker 1: primarily three dimensional type stuff, three D graphics, so that
Speaker 1: there's at least an illusion of depth. In fact, that's
Speaker 1: really where the graphics cards came out of. You know. Um,
Speaker 1: before that, you might have a GPU in a computer,
Speaker 1: but it would be uh incorporated directly onto the motherboard.
Speaker 1: It wasn't an additional card like you said. The Amiga
Speaker 1: had them. The Amiga is one of the earliest systems
Speaker 1: to have its own GPU. Before that, you could have
Speaker 1: graphics that were vector based graphics, like you know, the
Speaker 1: the video game Asteroids was vector based graphics. Yeah, these
Speaker 1: are games vector vector versus raster we're talking about here, Yes,
Speaker 1: I love those. We can stop giving examples, but I
Speaker 1: guess it helps to explain what the differences between vector
Speaker 1: graphics and raster graphics. Vector graphics graphics are mathematical there,
Speaker 1: they're like line art exactly. It's it's geometrical shapes that
Speaker 1: are based on mathematic uh, calculations. So these are lines
Speaker 1: and curves points. They could be shapes like polygons and uh.
Speaker 1: The nice thing about vector graphics is they are really scalable.
Speaker 1: You can it's dependent upon what your machine can do,
Speaker 1: not dependent upon the file. Uh. So in other words,
Speaker 1: you can a vector graphic at a certain size is
Speaker 1: going to look just as good or not as good
Speaker 1: as it will be at a size many many manion
Speaker 1: times larger than that. It all depends on the equipment,
Speaker 1: not on the graphics file. Yeah. Now, now, raster graphic
Speaker 1: or bitmapped graphics UM is made up of basically made
Speaker 1: up of little dots and um. That's the way are
Speaker 1: are our printers work, That's the way our displays works.
Speaker 1: So this is raster graphics that's much more common. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So well, if you talk about a good example, I
Speaker 1: think for what you were mentioning was photos. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you've ever taking a photo, put on your computer and
Speaker 1: decided you wanted to blow it up, you may notice
Speaker 1: that it starts to look rather grainy, block and yeah
Speaker 1: or blocky. You can see a little sharp angles where
Speaker 1: the which or the outlines of the pixels really yeah,
Speaker 1: and and then and what it's doing is the computer
Speaker 1: is basically having to make up information in between the
Speaker 1: little dots of information that came with the picture. So
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's going, well, that's kind of green
Speaker 1: and this kind of orange. All I'll split the difference
Speaker 1: and uh and uh, you know, when you make something smaller,
Speaker 1: it's easy because you're compressing the information. It can go,
Speaker 1: oh well, I don't need these pixels, so I'll toss
Speaker 1: them out and uh, you know things that you can
Speaker 1: only shrink a photo without distorting it, but expanding it
Speaker 1: as a different question and a graphics vector graphics aren't
Speaker 1: like that because when you blow something up, it goes,
Speaker 1: oh well, basically it's this point in that point, I'm
Speaker 1: you do the math. It looks fine. So the games
Speaker 1: and stuff that we play, those are raster graphics. That's
Speaker 1: where we've got those those images that are made up
Speaker 1: of pixels. So, um, you know, that's trying to create
Speaker 1: a uh, a detailed graphic representation of a character, especially
Speaker 1: character that's in motion and doing lots of stuff at
Speaker 1: a at a good frame rate. That's that's a pretty
Speaker 1: intensive process as far as processing power is concerned. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's why we had companies start to develop graphics
Speaker 1: cards to help take this load off the onboard graphics
Speaker 1: chips that computers had because they just weren't up to
Speaker 1: the task of processing that amount of information. Which meant
Speaker 1: that if you went out and you had a regular PC,
Speaker 1: will off the shelf PC, no additional graphics card other
Speaker 1: than what the onboard graphics card was, uh, and you
Speaker 1: come home, plug it in and you load up that
Speaker 1: first person shooter game that's brand new, it would not
Speaker 1: run very well. You would have to run it at
Speaker 1: a very low detail quality, so that it's having to
Speaker 1: do fewer polygons on the screen at a time because
Speaker 1: it just didn't have the processing power to keep up.
Speaker 1: Or you'd have to really and or you'd have to
Speaker 1: really reduce the frame rate so that the actual experience
Speaker 1: is not as smooth or pleasant. And you might think, wow,
Speaker 1: this is a terrible game, but really it's because the
Speaker 1: hardware you're running on isn't up to the task of
Speaker 1: running the game at the the experience that the game
Speaker 1: developers intended. So the graphics cards were what allowed you
Speaker 1: to plug it in, usually in a well. Back in
Speaker 1: the day, it was PC I or UM white a
Speaker 1: g P. Yeah, those were the two card slots to
Speaker 1: would plug them into. Today it's PC I Express almost
Speaker 1: exclusively um where which has got a It's it's a
Speaker 1: more efficient and faster way of transferring information from a
Speaker 1: card to the motherboard and uh and out to a display.
Speaker 1: So you would plug you would plug this in, and
Speaker 1: it was designed to be pretty easy, I mean relatively speaking.
Speaker 1: You're not soldering or anything, opening up a computer case,
Speaker 1: sliding a card in an expansion slot, screwing it tight
Speaker 1: so that it's not gonna wiggle in the case, close
Speaker 1: it back up, plug in your your peripherals, and you're
Speaker 1: good to go. It's a little more complicated now because
Speaker 1: if you're getting a state of the art, fastest possible
Speaker 1: processor you can get for a GP, especially you're getting
Speaker 1: two of them, because there are a lot of motherboards
Speaker 1: out there now that support dual graphics cards. Um, some
Speaker 1: of these are so powerful that they require more power
Speaker 1: than what the motherboard can supply. More power. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: they have to plug into your computer's actual powers apply,
Speaker 1: not the motherboard. And uh, particularly if they are so
Speaker 1: powerful that they have their own onboard fans. The fan
Speaker 1: used to help distribute the hot air so that the
Speaker 1: processor does not overheat. Yeah, well that's that's one of
Speaker 1: the problems that that prevent high end graphics cards from
Speaker 1: being included with some laptops, which is simply because it's
Speaker 1: easier to put in a high end graphics card that
Speaker 1: requires its own fan in a tower case, really a
Speaker 1: towered desktop computer case, because there's simply more room for it. Um.
Speaker 1: Less room on a laptop in general, less ability to
Speaker 1: find a way to disperse that extra heat. So not
Speaker 1: only are you're you dealing with the main central processing
Speaker 1: unit CPU, you're also dealing with the GPU. And you're going, wow,
Speaker 1: this is going to burn someone's legs off when they
Speaker 1: put it on their lap because I don't actually have
Speaker 1: a good way to disperse a seat, or it's going
Speaker 1: to cause the machine to shut down after twenty minutes
Speaker 1: of working, which is probably not quite as bad as
Speaker 1: burning somebody, but it's irritating, irritating, but not disfiguring. So
Speaker 1: there's that you take that home. But but yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean and and uh also easier to uh to get
Speaker 1: into a desktop machine to swap a card or add
Speaker 1: a card um, as you were pointing out, some you
Speaker 1: know support multiple Um. Then it would be necessarily with
Speaker 1: the laptop, especially something like an ultra book that is
Speaker 1: put together just so so that it makes that nice
Speaker 1: slim form factor that those are pretty much you're you're
Speaker 1: out of luck there. Um. The yeah, it's uh, it's
Speaker 1: the the graphics cards tend to be more of a
Speaker 1: desktop type of component than laptop. And I mean, for
Speaker 1: for the reasons you you pointed out, um, which is
Speaker 1: also one of the reasons why uh, serious hardcore video
Speaker 1: gamers on the PC tend to prefer desktop setups rather
Speaker 1: than a laptop. Because even if you go out and
Speaker 1: you buy a state of the art gaming laptop right
Speaker 1: now for thousands of dollars, and it might it might
Speaker 1: right now rival the best desktop computers out there. The
Speaker 1: advantage of the desktop computers have is that, in general,
Speaker 1: their machines are much more customizable and easily modified than laptops. There.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there are exceptions out there, but that's the
Speaker 1: general rule, and it's a pretty safe one because it's
Speaker 1: just tends to be a lot easier to fiddle with
Speaker 1: stuff that's inside a desktop case because you've got a
Speaker 1: lot more space there than you do with a laptop.
Speaker 1: There may be cards that a laptop just physically cannot
Speaker 1: accommodate because there's just not the room. And if you've
Speaker 1: seen some of these video cards, it's not hard to
Speaker 1: imagine because some of them look like they are you know,
Speaker 1: some of them look like they came straight out of
Speaker 1: a video game, like this looks like it's a magazine
Speaker 1: clip for a futuristic machine gun or something. Uh. Some
Speaker 1: of them am like wow, I don't know that I
Speaker 1: have a computer pretty enough to install this thing in.
Speaker 1: And in fact, some of them, I would argue the
Speaker 1: design here. They've created aesthetic for the video card, which
Speaker 1: never used to be a concern. Right. These were cards
Speaker 1: that just fit inside a computer case. You never saw
Speaker 1: them unless you had to open the case. But now
Speaker 1: we've got these cases that have exposed sides. So suddenly
Speaker 1: the aesthetic design of the graphics card has become a
Speaker 1: consideration well also, um, people who play a lot of
Speaker 1: I would argue this is probably the case for uh,
Speaker 1: hardcore serious gamers. Two, is it's nice that it looks
Speaker 1: cool because you're buying this, you know, updated graphics card
Speaker 1: that's going to be able to do all this extra
Speaker 1: pixel rendering, and you know you want to look cool.
Speaker 1: And some of these graphics cards cost as much or
Speaker 1: more than video game consoles, which brings me back to
Speaker 1: the whole thing about saying, you know, video cards are
Speaker 1: what made me a console gamer. It's not quite as
Speaker 1: simple as that, but it is very close in the
Speaker 1: sense that I saw that, you know, because I was
Speaker 1: there when the video game cards, the standalone graphics cards
Speaker 1: started to become a thing, um, and I could see
Speaker 1: that within six months to a year, the cards that
Speaker 1: had been out on the market were no longer able
Speaker 1: to run the most current games at their ideal settings.
Speaker 1: And that was a pretty rough wake up call to
Speaker 1: me saying that even if I had saved up the
Speaker 1: money to buy a video card for my computer and
Speaker 1: I had swapped it out, and I thought, wow, this
Speaker 1: is an amazing experience. Six months to a year down
Speaker 1: the road, I would feel like I'd have to do
Speaker 1: that all over again just to keep up with the
Speaker 1: video games that were coming out at that time. It's
Speaker 1: a constant cycle, or can be a concert cycle of
Speaker 1: needing more memory and a new processor and a new
Speaker 1: graphics processor with more memory, and having to upgrade one
Speaker 1: or the other or all of the above. Right you
Speaker 1: you eventually get to a point, like we said, where
Speaker 1: the motherboard can't support the latest graphics card. Then you're like,
Speaker 1: all right, now I gotta get a new, entirely new system. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so now, if I were the kind of person
Speaker 1: who I was constantly building computers, that might not be
Speaker 1: as big a deal because I could replace components as
Speaker 1: I needed to. And one can argue that maybe through
Speaker 1: the lifetime of a video game PC you spend less
Speaker 1: money than you would with a console game, depending upon
Speaker 1: how much gaming you do, because console games do tend
Speaker 1: to be more expensive, and they do tend to be
Speaker 1: more expensive for longer than PC games. PC games get
Speaker 1: marked down, generally speaking, faster than console games do, so
Speaker 1: there there is an argument to be made that you
Speaker 1: could save money over the long term. If you are
Speaker 1: an avid gamer, you buy a lot of games. Um,
Speaker 1: if you go with a PC gaming rig, especially if
Speaker 1: you decide to build one yourself, as opposed to buying
Speaker 1: something that was customized off the shelf, like if you
Speaker 1: actually go out and get the components. Um. It also
Speaker 1: gives the developer a little bit of an added advantage too,
Speaker 1: because if they're developing a title for say the PlayStation three,
Speaker 1: they know exactly what kind of graphics card is in there,
Speaker 1: so they can play to its strengths. Yeah. And actually
Speaker 1: that was a real problem early on too, is that
Speaker 1: you would get games that would be compatible with certain
Speaker 1: graphics cards but not others. And then you know, you
Speaker 1: might have a state of the art gaming computer back
Speaker 1: in the mid nineties, and then find out that even
Speaker 1: though you have a state of art gaming computer, you
Speaker 1: still can't play certain games because they are not compatible
Speaker 1: with the the hardware you have. Um. That's when you
Speaker 1: shake your fist in the air and screen con Yeah.
Speaker 1: We should also mention that effectively, the video card industry
Speaker 1: is a duopoli. There are two companies that that's essentially
Speaker 1: that's who you go to. Yeah, there's Nvidia and there's
Speaker 1: a m D Yeah, also known as a t I.
Speaker 1: Back in the day, but A m D purchased them,
Speaker 1: acquired a t I. There are there are others until
Speaker 1: makes some graphics cards, um, you know, and they're they're
Speaker 1: really others. But yeah, when when we're talking about this, uh,
Speaker 1: probably the listeners that wanted us to talk about this
Speaker 1: would already know that those two are the big players
Speaker 1: and they they're in a constant game of one upsmanship. Uh.
Speaker 1: The fastest card I could find so far, at least
Speaker 1: as far as clock speed goes, not performance. Actually, as
Speaker 1: far as performance goes, is not the fastest. But with
Speaker 1: clock speed, uh is uh without over clocking is uh?
Speaker 1: The A m D Radio on h D seven seven
Speaker 1: seven zero Giga Hurts edition, which it's one giga Hurts
Speaker 1: GPU and um it again that's without overclocking. But uh,
Speaker 1: that's not that fast. But yeah, when it when all
Speaker 1: it's doing, when it's handling primarily graphics, having that dedicated
Speaker 1: processing power behind it, you know that don't sneeze at
Speaker 1: the one gigga hurt. Now again, through the testing, it
Speaker 1: did not perform at the same level as some of
Speaker 1: the top of the line, most expensive cards that are
Speaker 1: out there. Uh. And part of that is just because
Speaker 1: you know, the Again, it's it's more than just the
Speaker 1: clock speed. We talked about that. So that's that's kind
Speaker 1: of the roundup on graphics cards in general, Like we
Speaker 1: had said, they're being used to process information beyond just
Speaker 1: graphics because it's got this parallel process and capability, so
Speaker 1: you can use it for things that require lots of
Speaker 1: parallel computational problems, things that you know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of scientific and medical applications for that kind of technology,
Speaker 1: but the one that we talked about most recently is
Speaker 1: cryptography and cracking codes and using parallel processing to run
Speaker 1: a brute force attack where you're just running lots and
Speaker 1: lots of variations on various passwords to try and determine
Speaker 1: what the hashing algorithm is for a for for a
Speaker 1: password site. So the unless the operating system is specifically
Speaker 1: assigning it tasks, you would have to have software that
Speaker 1: specifically directs information to the graphics card. And um, the
Speaker 1: people who yeah, there there are programs that specifically tell
Speaker 1: the GPU to to go to work on these these problems.
Speaker 1: So um, and then it's not specifically specific enough to
Speaker 1: where the hardware is. It's like, well, it's not a
Speaker 1: piece of graphics, so I can't do this. You know,
Speaker 1: it's very capable of handling that. So alright, So I
Speaker 1: think that wraps up this discussion on video cards. I
Speaker 1: hope that that was That was satisfying to our listeners
Speaker 1: who were asking us repeatedly to cover it. Actually, you know,
Speaker 1: I sound like I'm I'm exhausted by it. I'm not.
Speaker 1: I really I like seeing enthusiasm from our listeners. That's
Speaker 1: very It's a good thing. So if you are enthusiastically
Speaker 1: interested in a particular topic and we have not covered it,
Speaker 1: or perhaps we covered it a long time ago and
Speaker 1: it's darn near time that we recover it, let us know.
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Speaker 1: of those is text stuff h sw and Chris and
Speaker 1: I will talk to you again really soon for more
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