[zSilverFox]

Thanks. And here's another little thing that I wrote last night.

Quote:

A Guide to Video Card Lingo

Enjoy .

Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP)
An interface designed specifically for video cards. It has four bandwidth options for sending and recieving information from the CPU, which are 1x, 2x, 4x, and 8x. Most AGP cards are 8x, and are backwards compatible with older motherboards that support 4x at the most.

Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR)
Rendering mode used by ATI's Crossfire technology.

Anisotropic Filtering (AF)
Anisotropic filtering is a method of making textures look sharper, or less blurred. There are varying levels of AF, which define how many samples are used by the algorithm, which are 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x.

Anti-Aliasing (AA)
Anti-Aliasing is a set of algorithms that get rid of aliased, or jagged edges. Like AF, AA has varying levels of samples, which result in finer edges, which are 2x, 4x, and 8x in some higher end cards. AA can substantially cut down on your frame rate or FPS, depending on how many pixel pipelines there are and the CPU Bottleneck (both of which will be defined later)

Artifact
An artifact is a poorly rendered or sub-rendered texture or polygon, usually resulting from too high of an overclock on the GPU, or an unstable pipeline unlock.

Benching
The act of running a benchmark.

Benchmark
A score or program (Such as Aquamark or 3DMark) that's used to compare the power and ability of a card to others. The most common GPU benchmarking program series is 3DMark, by Futuremark. Futuremark offers free versions of each of their products, with the option to purchase them in order to gain access to more power or features.

BIOS
Basic Input/Output System. It's usually changed by enthusiasts with cards with locked, or disabled pipelines, to unlock or re-enable them.

Bottleneck
A bottleneck is something that will decrease the performance of a product. With video cards, the two biggest bottlenecks are CPU speed and amount of RAM. To eliminate or substantially decrease a bottleneck, you can increase the speed of your CPU and amount of RAM in your system.

Bus
System of wires or traces through which information is transferred.

Card
See Graphics Processing Unit

Crossfire
A multi-GPU system developed by ATI Technologies Inc. It allows a user to use two cards for frame rendering. To take advantage of Crossfire, you must purchase a Crossfire Ready motherboard (such as the RX200 by DFI), a Crossfire Master Card that supports the specific series of card you wish to use, and a card that's supported by that specific master card. For example, if you wanted two X800s, you would need to buy a Crossfire X850 or X800 master card, and a standard X800(GT, GTO, XL, XT, XT PE) card, or a lower card.

Crossfire Master Card
A video card without a standard BIOS, used for Crossfire systems.

Digital Imaging
Computer aided photo editing and creation.

Frame
One "snapshot" or amount of data that has been rendered and is ready to be displayed onscreen.

Frame Rate/Frames Per Second (FPS)
The amount of frames a specific card can render per second. Most gamers prefer at least 30 FPS, while a large amount prefer at least 60 FPS, and so on.

Graphics Engine
A software program or set of algorithms that handles most of the software level graphics work for an application.

Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)
Like a CPU for graphics, it's the core chip of a graphics card. It handles all calculations regarding an algorithm, and directs the hardware inside of it.

High Dynamic Range (HDR)
A lighting and shading algorithm used exclusively in nVidia cards and the ATI X1 series. It enhances the lighting and shading of a frame immensely. Currently, the only graphics/game engines to make use of it are the Serious 2 engine, Source engine, and the FarCry engine.

High End Card
Term used to refer to the best card currently available, or a card among the best, such as the 7800GTX.

Low End Card
Term used to refer to a lower quality video card, such as the 6200.

Memory
Chips used for storage of pre & post rendered information and textures. Most cards have either 128 megabytes of memory, or 256 megabytes of memory. Common forms of memory are DDR, DDR3, GDDR2, and GDDR3

Mid Range Card
Term used to refer to a card inbetween the low and high ends, such as the 6600GT or 6800GS.

Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)
A 32 bit interface used by older video cards.

Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI Express or PCI-E)
A PCI interface that has 16 lines of bandwidth for data transfer from the card to the CPU. All video cards after the X850XT PE and 6800 Ultra are PCI-E. PCI-E is also used for Crossfire and SLI.

Pixel Pipeline
A pixel pipeline can be viewed as an artisan or worker. It helps to handle the workload of a frame, therefor allowing it to be rendered faster. Pipelines are usually bunched up into "pipeline quads", which are groups of four pipelines, sometimes all of which handle the same specific or the same general job. A list of cards and the amount of pipelines in them:

nVidia/ATI
6200/X300-X600XT-X1300 Line: 4 Pipelines.
6600-6600GT/9800-X800GT-X700Pro X700XT: 8 Pipelines.
6800-6800GS/X800GTO-X800-x800pro-x850pro-x1600 line: 12 Pipelines.
6800GT-7800GS/X800X<->X800XTPE: 16 Pipelines.
7800GT/na: 20 Pipelines.
7800GTX/X1800XT PE (Not Yet Released): 24 Pipelines.

RAMDAC
Random Access Memory Digital-to-Analog Converter. It converts, you guessed it, digital signals into analog signals for VGA monitors.

Scalable Link Interface (SLI)
A multi-GPU technology system used by nVidia. It requires two identical cards be used on an SLI supporting board, with an SLI "clip." Also, SLI does not work on apps that do not have an SLI Profile.

SLI Profile
File used for SLI support.

Unlocking Pipelines
Unlocking pixel pipelines or vertex shaders on a card. It's commonly done with a BIOS flash.

Vertex Shader
Like a Pixel Pipeline, a vertex shader (vert for short) handles the shading of vertexes, or how textures and faces will look after rendering.


And now, I'm about to fall over from lack of sleep. Hope this helps with some questions, I'll edit in more info as words are thrown at me.