Video cards

[Kari Laine]

Hi,

I am wondering how these Video cards are made.

I have now studied little bit of Verilog and VHDL - very interesting
indeed. I assume commercial video cards use ASICs.
But are they defined with the HDL-languages ?
I guess yes because otherwise it would be impossible to design them...

Is there anywhere more information how a graphics card is implemented?
Is there just one processor or a collection of chips?

Is there available an FPGA board with which you could test on your own?
I think it should be like a second screen and you would have one
screen connected to a normal VGA-adapter to retain display all the time.

Anyway any comments about this welcomed.

http://www.knjn.com/
Sells a board which one can practice. But I am after an FPGA-board,
which support VGA. Actually one just do the VGA-interface in the FPGA -
right?

Best Regards
Kari


-- PIC - ARM - Microcontrollers - I2C - SPI Keypads - USB-RS232 -
USB-I2C - Accessories http://www.byvac.com I am just a happy customer

 

[BobW]

"Kari Laine" <klaine8@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:b9mdne01qtmoGYbRnZ2dnUVZ7vednZ2d@giganews.com...

Hi,

I am wondering how these Video cards are made.

I have now studied little bit of Verilog and VHDL - very interesting
indeed. I assume commercial video cards use ASICs.
But are they defined with the HDL-languages ?
I guess yes because otherwise it would be impossible to design them...

Is there anywhere more information how a graphics card is implemented?
Is there just one processor or a collection of chips?

Is there available an FPGA board with which you could test on your own?
I think it should be like a second screen and you would have one
screen connected to a normal VGA-adapter to retain display all the time.

Anyway any comments about this welcomed.

http://www.knjn.com/
Sells a board which one can practice. But I am after an FPGA-board,
which support VGA. Actually one just do the VGA-interface in the FPGA -
right?

Best Regards
Kari

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Look around the Xilinx and Altera websites. You'll find a ton of info about
implementing various graphics standards.

Bob
--
== All google group posts are automatically deleted due to spam ==

 

[krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:32:23 +0300, Kari Laine <klaine8@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I am wondering how these Video cards are made.

I have now studied little bit of Verilog and VHDL - very interesting
indeed. I assume commercial video cards use ASICs.

Yes. The term to search on is "GPU" ("Graphics Processing Unit").

But are they defined with the HDL-languages ?

Most likely.

I guess yes because otherwise it would be impossible to design them...

Not necessarily. There are still a lot of schematics users out there. Don't
ask me why, but... ;-)

Is there anywhere more information how a graphics card is implemented?

Sure, there is a lot of literature on the web. Look for white papers on the
GPU manufacturer's sites.

Is there just one processor or a collection of chips?

Everything is "just one processor" anymore. ;-) In this case, it's a graphics
processor.

Is there available an FPGA board with which you could test on your own?
I think it should be like a second screen and you would have one
screen connected to a normal VGA-adapter to retain display all the time.

Sure, this is a common project. You should be able to find such boards with a
Google search. You're not going to make anything competitive with nVidia, for
instance, but you'll learn a *lot*. Be warned, it's not a small project.

Anyway any comments about this welcomed.

http://www.knjn.com/
Sells a board which one can practice. But I am after an FPGA-board,
which support VGA. Actually one just do the VGA-interface in the FPGA -
right?

Sure. Shouldn't be too hard to find.