VOODOO1 Graphics Card (GPU)

The voodoo 1 was the first 3D graphics card for PC to come about. It allowed people to play gamesLike quake, which was a first person, 3D shooter.

The graphics card is the component of the computer which turns the information that the CPU, sendsTo it, into graphics that are displayed on your monitor. The card must render all the different parts of The game and the graphics. The more RAM the GPU has, the more things it can render at once. Theram is the memory of the graphics card.

The Voodoo was made in 1996 and only had 4mb of ram, which compared to graphics cards in todays standards, is terrible.It was also the first graphics card to use polygons. Polygons are what are in the game, and makes the meshes. The more polygons in the a character or a characters face, the more detailed the character will be. The the game Quake, the amount of Polygons used for the character in the above picture, is only 200. When the polygons have been used to make the the quality of the characters, they use

textures to make the ʻskinsʼ. The textures are very low res as thats all that the graphics card could handle.

The Voodoo1ʼs speed is only 0.045 Bt/s which if you look at todays speed of the GPUʼs is very very limited. This is the same for the power of the GPU, the Voodooʼs power is 50 MHz

GeForce 8800

The GeForce was brought out in 2006 and in the time difference between the Voodoo and the GeForce 8800, there have been many improvements. A big upgrade for the RAM, it has gone from being 4MB of RAM to 768MB of RAM.

The same goes for the power and speed, the power for the GeForce is 578 MHz and the speed is 38.8 Bt/ s. This GPU also has a fan on it, unlike the Voodoo. This is because the GPU is more powerful and uses more power, which means it gets hotter, so hard working GPUʼs need their own fan to keep them cool.What these extra specs mean, is that we can play games with better graphics. Here is a screen shot of the Tom Clancyʼs Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. This is one of the games that the GeForce 8800 could run. The extra specs and power go to show how they can increase the graphical look of the game.

You can see the better detail in the objects. There has also been lighting added. In the doom screen shot, there are no shadows which means there is no dynamic

lighting, but in the Ghost Recon game there is dynamic lighting. We can see that shadows on various parts, like the person, and the street lamp in the background. Also, going from when Quake had 200 polygons per enemy, the amount of polygons for a character in this, is around 15,000.

RADEON HD7990The Radeon HD7990 is the benchmark of graphics cards in todays standards. It has 6GB of RAM, which is 6000 MB. The speed and the power are also a big improvement from the GeForce 8800. It has the power of 1GHz which is 1000 MHz and the speed is is 256 Bt/s. The Radeon HD7990 was released in 2013.

Below is a screen shot of Battlefield 4, the detail from the Ghost recon game to this, is way out of its league. Battlefield 4 uses roughly 20 to 30 thousand polygons for each of their characters. This isnʼt a huge leap

from the ghost recon, but thats because technology has come a long way and now we can make each polygon look better than we could many years ago.

Also the textures and graphics have been improved so much that the polygon count, doesnʼt need to be as high as it is.When making a game, one of the most valuable resources to the game creators is memory. Polygons take up lots of memory.