Computer graphics

[bertusgeert 1]

I sat down at this computer in the library and just looked at the background for a while. The picture of a dessedrt landscape was very impressive because of its clarity and brightness.

With the ever improving graphics and video cards that are coming around, how do you measure the quality?

It used to be pixels, but now pixels are so small that it probably doesn't matter any more. Will we then get to a point where graphics on a computer screen can't get better because it is so close to the real thing, or will is surpass what we can see around us?



disclaimer: I don't want to sift through hours of information when someone here probably knows the answer or can tell me where to find it. and THAT is why I didn't google it.

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As jy dom is moet jy bloei!

[GTAVercetti 0]

Quote

I sat down at this computer in the library and just looked at the background for a while. The picture of a dessedrt landscape was very impressive because of its clarity and brightness.

With the ever improving graphics and video cards that are coming around, how do you measure the quality?

It used to be pixels, but now pixels are so small that it probably doesn't matter any more. Will we then get to a point where graphics on a computer screen can't get better because it is so close to the real thing, or will is surpass what we can see around us?



disclaimer: I don't want to sift through hours of information when someone here probably knows the answer or can tell me where to find it. and THAT is why I didn't google it.

I have no idea...but a pixel is still a pixel. They are not getting smaller. The screens are getting bigger so they can handle more of them (higher resolutions).

Why yes, my license number is a palindrome. Thank you for noticing.

[pilotdave 0]

Your monitor has a maximum resolution. The pixels are a finite size. Digital cameras can take pictures far too big to display on a computer monitor (without "zooming out" and losing resolution). My home computer runs at 1280x1024. Nowhere near the resolution of a 4 or 5 megapixel digital camera. And now there are 10+ megapixel cameras available. Dunno what the future of computer screens is, but the current ability to take and store crystal clear pictures is far beyond the capability to display them on a screen. Pixels on computer screens have gotten smaller over time and will continue to get smaller... but I think it's gonna take a big leap in technology to come anywhere near catching up with digital cameras.

Dave

[SkyDaemon 0]

Computer monitors do an excellent job of replicating reality as best they can. Assuming there comes a point where the Star Trek "holodeck" becomes a viable product, the question will come down to a set of values. Is there value in the fact that something is real versus artificial?

Is there something that comes from owning a real plant versus a nylon/plastic replica?
Is there value to seeing a real sunset versus a computer simulation of one?
Is there value in holding a real person's hand versus a hologram (ala Star Trek)?

Technology has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go (such as the sunset outside doesn't sometimes turn into a big blue screen with white fixed text that read "this sunset has caused a general protection fault and cannot continue", however computers are known to do that...)

You bring up an interesting point.

-=Raistlin

find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

[dorbie 0]

The main limiting factor today is the display, especially for simply displaying images rather than doing complex real-time rendering.

In layman's terms, graphics cards are getting faster at drawing textured triangles in 3D. They can draw a lot more of them and they can fill a lot more 3D pixels a second than ever before. They support features like programmability in each pixel shading operation. Antialiasing is getting much better and faster (and more efficient, the penalty for enabling it is getting less). Texture quality is improving with anisotropic filtering getting faster. Features like bump mapping can be implemented through math operations per pixel like dot products instead of simple fixed function additions and modulations.

In addition to all this pixels are getting much higher quality in terms of precision. Signed extended range floating point pixel formats are now available giving higher quality and high dynamic range (think exposure adjustment in the display of images or of a 3D scene for example).

Graphics buses like PCI-Express continue to give more bandwidth to the graphics card from system memory and geometry acceleration continues to amaze with the performance increases.

Applications developers are also getting better at programming graphics cards.

For basic stuff like Word this makes no difference, but for games it does. For video editing software it makes no difference unless the developers write their applications in a way that can exploit the hardware. Same with something like photoshop, unless they deliberately use hardware you'd never tell the difference and are really just relying on software. An example in photoshop could be compositing layers and dragging them around independently etc. This could be done with hardware acceleration today taking almost no CPU and just displaying the results, it would be lightning fast and allow very interractive placement of layers and painting of masks for example, but this isn't how the software works (last time I looked), it's all just done in the CPU.

A cheap graphics card today exceeds the performance and flexibility of multi-million dollar fridge sized systems I used to program five -> eight years ago. Some popular applications that could exploit this often don't but that may start to change.