Some Video Card features... what do they do

[Gamingphreek]

Ok i have been working with computers since i was like 5 years old . Yeah, well anyways there are somethings that i still dont know EXACTLY what they do. Here they are:

Z-Buffer

F-Buffer

T-Buffer

Not too too sure about ATI's Truform

Fram Buffer

Texture Format
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Then a couple of things in Nvidias driver im not sure

Fog Table Emulation

Conformant Texture Clamp

And what is the timing method...i shtat the monitor response time

Last but not leeast what do they mean by double scan for lower resolutions



Yeah it might seem overwhelming, but hopefully it will help everyone out. Again i have a general idea about what some of these things do but not too sure.

-Kevin

 

[VIAN]

Z-Buffer

Thats a buffer for the Z demension.

T-Buffer

Back in da day 3dfx VSA-100 Buffer that was capable of certain cinematic effects.

Truform

Adds more polygons to character models of old games to make them look nicer. I think the game has to support it though - not sure.

Fog Table Emulation

That's a compatability feature for OpenGL, not used in games, but used in 3d creation programs.

And what is the timing method...i shtat the monitor response time

?

Last but not leeast what do they mean by double scan for lower resolutions

I think it's because the lower resolutions look better that way.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Sorry i meant What is timing method.

I give like auto detect, and General Timing Formula, fixed aspect ratio... what is that... is that the response time of a monitor... or is that different.

-Kevin

Can anyone go even more indepth?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Sorry i meant What is timing method.

I give like auto detect, and General Timing Formula, fixed aspect ratio... what is that... is that the response time of a monitor... or is that different.

-Kevin

Can anyone go even more indepth?

It has to do with how the video card tells the monitor which refresh rate and resolution to run at; it's part of the VGA specification. I don't know too much about how the various methods differ, but nowadays most monitors should work with pretty much all of them.

F-Buffer

This is an ATI-specific feature (which is basically unused) that allows shader programs to store data between passes. In theory, this can be used to break up a long shader into small parts that can be run on an R3XX card, although there would obviously be a performance hit from this. I don't know of any programs that use it.

Frame Buffer

The Frame Buffer is an area of memory on your video card (or, if you have integrated video, in your main system memory) which is directly mapped to the screen output. When the video card draws to the screen, it reads the data that is in the frame buffer and displays it on the monitor. "Double" and "Triple" buffering use multiple frame buffers, and switch between them (as opposed to just rewriting the data in the same buffer). This eliminates artifacts that you can get when you use a single buffer and a screen refresh happens while the buffer is still being drawn.

Texture Format

There are various formats that textures can be stored in; I don't know the exact details, but it covers things like mipmaps and how they are stored in memory, and whether or not the textures are compressed. This is rarely important unless you are writing a game engine.

 

[VIAN]

Sorry i meant What is timing method.

I give like auto detect, and General Timing Formula, fixed aspect ratio... what is that... is that the response time of a monitor... or is that different.

-Kevin

Can anyone go even more indepth?

I would keep that at auto detect or/let windows choose it, I think it the uppermost on the pulldown menu.