questions about video on PC (refresh rate, anisotropic filtering, etc.)?

Question

ok, it is quite a long question but I'm sure many people know,

what part of the computer does all of the things in a video game? is it that the video card does all the texturing, antialiasing texture filtering shading and visual effects and the CPU does the actual objects verticies and the AI? please expound on this. oh and one other thing, does increasing the refresh rate (e.g. 60hz-120hz) increase the load on the video card, or just on the monitor?

Answer 1

The Part of the Computer that runs a video game, consists of almost everything in the Computer, Processor sends information, memory is used to access information, Hard drive read/stores information, Graphics Card has a processing unit to process graphical data, Graphical Memory allows access to information, Sound Card processes data to be converted to sound, Optical drives read information on the disc, during games.



The Video Card itself has a processor, and memory on it, they process Texturing, Anti-aliasing, Filtering, Shadows, objects and visual effects. Getting information sent from the CPU, they process it, and show it on the screen. The CPU, or the Computers main processor, processes information sent from the disc, and hard drive, and organizes them, and send them to where they need to go, whether its sound or video data to the sound card, and video card. The CPU does the AI processing. Refresh Rate is strictly about monitors, yet some video cards will limit the refresh rate, as the GPU (graphics processing unit is slow and can't send too much information to the monitor to display hence limits the Refresh Rate), its the frequency of how fast you want your computer screen data to be refreshed. Less hertz will mean that the screen will be slow, so whatever you are watching on the screen, especially in action games, you can tell that some frames are skipped. IF you have a higher refresh rate, you will basically see more frames, and thus it will be much smoother. Refresh Rate increases load on both Monitor and Video card, but mostly video card, since video card can send as much information needed, while the monitor displays most of it, depending on its refresh rate. They have to both match the same refresh rate, otherwise problems with the displayed image can happen.

Answer 2

First: you already have most of it right. Yes, the video card does texturing, it does all the pixel shading, and all those other cool graphical effects that make the elements of video look good.



The CPU does the AI and basic information about the objects, but the vertices? Depends, there is some gpu involvement in that. If you have an ATI card try running glxgears, and it will show how well your card is rendering at the moment by showing a spinning object. That vertex information is kept in graphical memory, at least when it's involved in complex movements.



It is possible to make the cpu help out the gpu on some graphical tasks, but generally it's best in a pc to make the gpu do as much as it can, because it's a higher-bandwidth, higher-flops processor than the cpu is. In the ps3 the Cell cpu is designed more like gpu's and actually is used for graphics as well, but that's different.



Increasing the refresh rate on your pc's video output does nothing to the video card. The frequency of the final output comes after all the processing is said and done anyway. If your card is processing your video at 60 fps, and you switch output from 60hz to 120hz, you'll just have 60fps video output at 120hz. On the other hand, if you've got 120fps video, increasing refresh to 120hz could actually make it look better than it would at 60hz. But that doesn't stress the video card. It might stress your monitor if it can't handle 120hz input.

Answer 3

I would get 1 gb Ram (if all you wanted was to play the game, ie, you're upgrading the PC, if buying get 2gb, but that's another story). Also you'll probably need a new video card, if you don't mind blowing $180, the Radeon HD 3850 (GeForce 8800 GT would be much better, but it can be anywhere from $20- $80 more expensive) is supposed to be okay, and should last you awhile, as long as this is the highest level of game you'll be playing. Remember to check if your motherboard can support the new card. Just because you have a slot for a video card in your computer, doesn't mean it's the same slot that the video card will accept. ;) Remember though that you can generally only modify the video card if the computer is a desktop computer, if it's a laptop, you'll probably only able to add more ram.