alright..i'll try my best not to upset anyone so that i dont end up in flames.

here is perhaps a crude (not accurate) way how a computer generally works.

okay, the whole computer system faithfully runs on this single pulse called the CLOCK. so initially, we can imagine that when the CLOCK ticks, the computer processes something. CLOCK is what people usually coin as the Front Side Bus, which nowadays tick around 200MHz (200 million times per second). Engineers think that this is pretty slow for the CPU, so they invented a circuit, for every tick of the FSB, it would generate 15-20 ticks. This is what they call a MUL (multiplier).

So CPU makers set the multipliers by having this extra multiplier circuit embedded into a CPU. So if Intel wants a Pentium 4 running at 3000MHz, given that the FSB is at 200MHz, they set the multiplier circuit to tick 15 times for every FSB tick. 200x15=3000MHz. Now you have a CPU that runs 3000 million stuff per second.

They set the multiplier circuit by cutting a few resistors. Try imagine the circuit made out of resistors, if you have one resistor less, the total resistance will change. So before a CPU maker manufactures their CPU, they conveniently use a laser to cut amounts of resistors so that the total resistance would represent the multiplier value that they want. Intel does this on-chip, while AMD did it on-die with the old Athlon series.

What's the difference between a 2g P4 and a 3g one? Given of the same process, same socket type, same processor family.. usually it is just a speed bump. How did they do it? Instead of cutting the resistor at the 12.5X multiplier level, they cut it at the 15X multiplier level.

So why not have a 30X multiplier level so that our P4 can run at 6GHz? Well, transistors don't really like being switched on and off that fast...yet. *laughs*

Common Graphics Technologies Explained.

Well, I'm sure many of you out there can't differentiate your AA from your AF, and you HDR from your Open EXR, Generally, here's a simple newbie's guide to the joys of graphics technology, for your budding techsperts who want to jack it up a level, no, it will not make you nVidia or ATi's chief graphics expert, but what it is meant to do is to explain how certain methods make things look a lot better. lol!

Anti Aliasing

When it comes to image quality, nothing is a refreshing as Anti Aliasing. What is this anti aliasing you ask? And how can Aliasing be so baaad? Well what we see on our monitors are actually millions of tiny square pixels or dots making up a grand image, and as you know, squares have really visible edges and images are composed of X and Y coordinates. BUT, the thing is, when the resolution is low enough, you can actually see those jagged edges where different objects or textures meet, so in simple layman terms, Anti Aliasing guesses the meeting coordinates by taking loads of samples, rounds the coordinates off, and applies a tasteful shade of grey ( or a mixture of the contrasting colors, meaning black and white gets grey lol!)

Mmkay, so, that explanation wasn't quite helpful, but a picture says a thousand words, so here is what it means. The 2 pictures below show the same graphic, but one with AA turned on, and one without. Take a guess which is which. The one with the AA turned on looks smoother than the one without.












As you can see, it looks smoother with AA turned on because there are more in-betweens, as compared to the jaggies seen in the one without AA.

Generally the accuracy and the quality of an anti aliased image is determined by the method and number of samples taken, the more samples taken, the more accurate the average, so the greater the quality of the image. So, there is such thing as a free lunch, and all that sampling and rounding off takes its toll on the performance of the graphics card, the higher the sample rate, the higher the raw performance hit. All in all it'll be up to you to set the sample rate for the Anti Aliasing, but most hard core hacks like me prefer it jacked up to 8x. Lower sampling rates can be used for better performance on slower graphics cards.

Anisotropic Filtering

Simply, imagine if you were in a world composed of pixels, and you viewed all of it from an X and Y direction, meaning you cannot tilt your head up and down, the world actually seem kind of square, and if you could tilt your head up and down what would you get? Distance aliasing. Generally what AF does is make a texture scale proportionately to distance and maintains it clarity, let's just put it this way, how far can we see until the image blurs us? Our human eye has a focal length of 25cm to infinity, which would mean, it would be very very very very far before our eyes blur out. But in Computers, it seems that this problem can be replicated in a measly 50 meters or so. And so, to give the illusion of real life distance, AF is employed with the use of multiple samples as AA (read previous page), to extrapolate a proper distance bearing image. In short, AF is a way of faking distance. And how distance appears to the viewer, it's all faked by AF.

What is the difference between AF and other techniques such as Bilinear and Trilinear filtering? Simple. The latter are isotropic, meaning that can only filter in a square pattern, but the clincher is, that in games and with human eyes, we view things in an ever enlarging field of view, anisotropic filtering uses a trapezoidal point of view at things, somewhat mirroring human sight dynamics. Generally AA works on mating two surfaces, AF works on mating a whole range of distance, both work to make the image more fluid from a human point of view. The measure of Anisotropic filtering is the degree of anisotropy in the process, which comes in 2x, 8x and 16x, and mind you that each brand has their own specific way of implementing AF, so screenshots are the best way to determine the quality of the methods of AF being used.

VSync

Generally, a monitor is a scan based drawing device, it retains the old images as new images are being drawn in. And in Computer games, that isn't a good thing, just imagine, we froze time for a second and looked at our monitors, if you timed it correctly while the monitor was still drawing the upper half, the lower half would look vastly dissimilar, simply because the frame rate (the rate stuff is being drawn it) at higher than the refresh rate (the rate the monitor is going from black to white), this causes image tearing, when moving quickly in a Game without Vsync, the images appear disjointed and torn. Here's an example :



This is Carl Johnson, CJ. Say hi to CJ! Hi CJ!

CJ is from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and he's wearing his pimp suit. This picture was taken by Chewxy, and Chewxy says he could have given me one with the gimp suit, but that would be deemed obscene. lol.

Do you see those bright bars, followed by darker areas? The reason is this : This picture was taken on a phone. And since it was taken on a phone, the refresh rates were not in sync with the refresh rate of Chewxy's monitor, hence you can see the redraw lines. The bright bars are where the frame is being drawn, while the darker portions of the picture parts of the old frame.

Now, back to Vsync. Imagine, if your picture generated was being faster than the picture being drawn on the monitor... the result would most certainly be ugly, right? Especially when the image is in motion. The picture would have CJ's head on the left side of the screen, and his body in the right side of the screen.. now, that wouldn't be too nice, right?

So Vsync remedies this situation by making sure that the amount of frames per-second doesn't exceed the monitor's refresh rate, essentially the monitor is purged of images and a completely new one is redrawn on the screen, fresh, without the last frame affecting the new image.

There are times you shouldn't use Vsync, times where image quality is not the primary concern and instead speed, like benchmarks, ultra fast video, twitch gaming and such. But I do recommend turning it on for some easy eye candy. Anyways, who's eyes can see faster than 30 Frames per second (average) ?


HDR or High Dynamic Range

Simply, a monitor isn't as bright as the thermonuclear reactor in the sky, a.k.a the sun, it can produce a brightness range or in an intensity that can emulate real life. Simply, look into a bright light, what we see at first is blinding, as the aperture around our eyes closes out to make sure less light comes in, the blooming effect decreases and you gradually see the details surrounding the bright object as the exposure is lowered by your eyes. If you're an avid camera person like I am, simply, how do we increase brightness or the bloom effect, No1 Open that damned aperture up, or, No2 increase the time the CMOS or CCD is exposed to light. No1 is not really feasible for computers unless they're going to reach out and poke our eyes, so, No. 2 seems a better choice no?

High Dynamic Range is generally also an extension of the standard RGB format, normally pixels come in 3 colors Red, Green and Blue, but HDR adds another, namely Brightness, once the RGB color has been determined, a brightness level is added to that color. So, what is this information used for you ask? Generally, what you get is better image interpretation during movement, but that's just the tip of the ice berg. The 1337 really steps in when it comes to lighting!

HAHA, this is where the extra info shows it's power! When it comes to lighting! Generally most games treat lighting as a faked affair, ever feel stumped when you see light being unaffected the luminosity of certain objects like water or glass? Why? Simply, because that light has no brightness value, so how can you determine what brightness it is after is passes through something translucent eh? So game makers cheat by putting 2 light sources, one in front of that "glass" and one behind! Neat trick, but it's not really realistic, because real light is expected to hit objects, lose intensity and bounce off it! So HDR makes all this realistic and filling light a reality, plus it even supports the blending of multiple light sources.

Basically, HDR emulates light by calculating the photons reaching into the camera, and by working backwards, they calculate the bounces and reflections and refractions, hence, making the scene really realistic and wonderfully nice.

Like before these technologies do take a bite out of performance, but play a game like Farcry or Splinter Cell with this puppy turned on and you'll agree that it was all worth it!

Welcome any suggestions. Will post more later.

Referring to above:

AA and AF - in addition to number of samples, quality also varies by sample pattern and blending method/algorithm.


HDR - I don't think they add a "brightness" variable. It's simply extending the dynamic range of each color channel. In standard "32bit color", you get 8 bit integer per channel (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha). Using FP16 HDR (OpenEXR format, like in Far Cry) you get 16bits floating point per channel. That's a huge improvement in dynamic range.

Dynamic range - The ratio of the highest value to the lowest value which can be represented/stored.

Simply said, what HDR enables (taken from an nvidia presentation):
-Bright things can be really bright
-Dark things can be really dark
-And the details can be seen in both

That's really what HDR is in a nutshell. It's not tied to a particular method or implementation (like a lot of marketing BS would have you believe).

This post has been edited by ikanayam: Mar 11 2006, 03:10 PM

oversimplified i admit, not actually brightness, but radiance maps, thus you get the RGBA maps instead of the usual RGB. (If i'm correct the A value doesn't do anything on non HDR capable cards since it's a transparency value). If i'm correct HDR isn't only the extension of the original gamut, but the addition of the alpha transparency map and it's addition to the range available.

Ofcourse even with that extra dynamic range, the ratio from brightest to darkest, it wouldn't mean much without the alpha value to derive multi exposures of an image, thereby overcoming the limitation of our monitors.

And on the AF part, i did put something there (mind you most people don't know the meaning of algorithm)


ATi's angle independent AF is generally one i like

The Alpha value is actually used even without HDR. A simple example of where it is used is in Far Cry tree leaves. The Alpha value makes the parts between the leaves transparent. It's also sometimes used to render fog.

I've done quite a bit of research into HDR as my project is related to it. It is exactly as i described. Like i said, how it is achieved in hardware or software may differ. High Dynamic Range, it's really quite self explanatory. Simple concept, but very distorted now thanks to marketing. They've tied it into their particular methods of achieving it.

http://www.openexr.com has some info on HDR.

This post has been edited by ikanayam: Mar 12 2006, 02:43 AM

we all know there is 3.3v, 5 and 12v rail... wats the fuction of these rails... which goes where... wats an optimum fluctuation value... since i dont have a voltmeter to test those rails, how accurate are the readings from bios and smartgardian... im using dfi lanparty nf3 ultra-d... if anyone asking why nf3 got smartguardian coz its modded to use in nf3 platform...

do i need to format my pc if i change my graphic card?

i dont think so. but you have to install your new graphics card's driver.

any comments on this specs?
planning to get a desktop this week.

AMD 3200+
gigabyte k8n-SLI
1G kingston ram
160gb maxtor sata6
forsa 7600GT
LG DVD-RW

btw..i'm not very good in com hardware.
thx for any comments made.

Pls post in hardware QnA.btw, imo tis system is good enough. Perhaps u can change to Seagate HDD bcoz Maxtor might hv some probs with nF4 chipset.

the last socket for intel is socket 775(or also known as socket T) and not 755 la...

MotherBoard: foxconn 945PL7AC-S2
http://www.foxconnchannel.com/Product/moth...ID=en-us0000145
Processor : Intel Pentium D 930
hard Disk :Seagate 7200.10 320 GB
RAM : Kingstom DDR2 553 1GB

What Graphic Should i use? and power supply?
can give me suggestion?

thank

guys do you know where to find the viewsonic video processor??? any other video processor?? which 1 is good

i getting a AM2 3500 it wrote there 2.2Ghz

and what i see the ram i wanna get is DDR2 667

did it should be 333 FSB then hw does calculate the speed???

using very low multiply or DDR2 count in other way?

psu calculator to determine which psu rate to use with your system.

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp

This post has been edited by quintessential: Jul 25 2006, 09:52 PM

I have some question regarding HDD. Bout this this SATA thingy, i was kinda curious about all this sata1, 2 n 3. Is it diff. in speed?

And if so, say that my mobo support sata1, could i also plug in sata2 or 3 hdd?

sata1 and sata2 differs only in transfer rate
u can still plugin sata2 hd into a sata1 setup
only that the transfer speed will be limited to sata1's

Got a problem with mixing a SATA hdd drive and a PATA hdd drive...i am using an intel 945 p board..i set my PATA to master ide and window detected it but didnt come the drive..do i need to set anything to bios? i am using a intel bios..updated to the latest version..In bios the PATA drive will become boot sequence first instead of SATA first?..any help?i cant seems to set my SATA drive bott first

This post has been edited by kerryking: Aug 21 2006, 02:57 PM

question here, how to determind the amd barton i using is overclock able?or wat so call unlock ver?

what is the best mainboard for pentium D n the price is below rm350....is foxconn ok?