#something to do with it requiring specific antialiasing settings

[blackjackkent]

Grr, just spent a bunch of time trying to take a really silly screenshot but the freecam tools don't seem to be working with Patch 7. :(

I downloaded the latest version and everything, but

JK POST CANCELED I FIGURED IT OUT

[apklup]

World Of Tanks Blitz Apk Mod , World Of Tanks Blitz Apk Data , New 2021*

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[posterclever974]

X Mplayer2 Download

Freeware

Feb 13, 2014  mplayer2 is a command-line video player that was developed from the initial MPlayer, providing you with the original functions and more, along with various improvements of. Hi, what a long absence, I'm still alive, MPlayerX too. Now I'm planning some, relatively, big feature into MPlayerX for the next major release. It may cost some time. Before doing it, I thought I'd better release once. So actually 1.0.1 isn't a exciting release, just a little step forward. MPlayerX is armed by FFmpeg and MPlayer, which means it could handle any media format in the world without extra plug-ins or codec packages. Dance on your fingers. Pinch, tap or swipe, MPlayerX provides you the easiest way to control the playback. Click to download the Control Script for Sofa. Dec 13, 2018  Download MPlayer. MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems. Login Social Sharing. Tech news in your inbox. Get TechSpot's weekly newsletter Facebook.

Windows

46.0 MB

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Aug 28, 2019  Bandwidth Analyzer Pack analyzes hop-by-hop performance on-premise, in hybrid networks, and in the cloud, and can help identify excessive bandwidth utilization or unexpected application traffic. Download a free trial for real-time bandwidth monitoring, alerting, and more. NOTE: The MPlayer App is optimised for iOS 7 or later.Download the MPlayer App free of charge before your next Monarch flight to enjoy our exciting.

It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies.

Another great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too! Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the Siemens DVB, DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+.

MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls. European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic and Korean fonts are supported along with 12 subtitle formats (MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and our own: MPsub). DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions) are supported as well.

What's New:

After a long pause, we decided that it might be a good idea to make a new release. While we had our fun with the naming scheme with lots of 'pre' and 'rc' it seemed time to move on and with everyone incrementing major versions between weekly and monthly we hope to be forgiven for jumping ahead to 1.1.

This release is intended to be compatible with the recent FFmpeg 0.11 release. We hope it will be useful to distros and other users relying on FFmpeg 0.11. Everyone else is encouraged to follow Subversion HEAD to always get the latest features and bug fixes. You might still want to read the release announcement to get a short summary of any bigger changes and improvements.

Mplayer For Windows 7

Among the bigger news is that we found a maintainer for the X11 gmplayer GUI, so those holding out on it against our earlier recommendations will get a lot of bug fixes.

There is also support for more subtitle types (Bluray, DVB, DVB closed-caption for example), many improvements to -vo gl including output of 10 bit video, very basic but usable OpenGL ES support and much better SDL support which makes it a usable choice on OSX (particularly on older PowerPC variants much faster than corevideo or quartz). MPlayer will now also try much harder to handle intermittent network failures, for example trying to reconnect.

As part of the code cleanup efforts, the internal libfaad2 copy has been removed since the FFmpeg decoder is working well. Also the internal mp3lib copy is no longer used by default since the many alternatives (FFmpeg, libmpg123, libmad) avoid its recurring issues like incorrect decoding with newer compilers. However it can still be forced at runtime for easier tracking of regressions. Please do not rely on this since it will be removed in the future. If you do not actually need it consider disabling it at compile time with --disable-mp3lib.

As a first for this release, the tarballs are available in two variants: compressed with xz and compressed with gzip. Please get the xz variant if you can to save bandwidth, the gzip version is for everyone that cannot use it. Should you never have encountered xz compressed files, newer versions of tar can uncompress it via 'tar xJf MPlayer-1.1.tar.xz'.

What's New:

Upgraded gcc to 7.3, enabled lto in FFMpeg

Enabled dash demuxer in FFMpeg

Enabled libopenmpt in FFMpeg

Updated gnutls to 3.5.18

Updated libvpx (git)

Updated openh264 (git)

Updated kvazaar (git)

Updated x265 (hg)

Apps similar to MPlayer 6

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Application/x-mplayer2 Chrome Download

thx

I needed a simple command-ling media player, and this was perfect! Extremely lightweight and very versatile. I use it for some custom clip management and window capture for streamers to use when broadcasting using the OBS Studio streaming/broadcasting software on Twitch. I take chat commands that create a text semaphore/trigger file, and when the script sees the trigger, it uses this Mplayer utility to play. I am just doing this for fun, and to help streamers offer a little something extra. if a streamer wants to rotate 8 different 'Hug' clips when a viewer runs the '!hug @somename' command in chat, there should be a utility that can launch the clips when the commands are run, then rotate the clips so if 4 or 5 people use the 'Hug' command to hug each other, it doesn't just play the same clip over and over. The fact that you can title the player window allows a streamer to have a few different windows captures set up. Maybe 1 for fullscreen clips with a chromakey filter, a regular fullscreen clip fo speciual event clips, and maybe ones for subscriber 'intro clips' they use when they join chat to announce their presence in style. Maybe another for 'accent clips/memes', so users can add commentary by launching clips at proper moments, like a '!rip' command that plays a rotation of funny 'I'm dead' clips when the streamer dies playing a game. The streamer just ads these 3 or 4 window capture sources to each scene they want clips to be available, then the script/utility launches each clip with the appropriate window title to have it play at the right size and location. I'd love to see someone actualy do this properly. I have it all working. I just needed a 'lighter' player that was flexible enough to support all the different clip types. I was using VLC Media Player, but it did noy play smoothly, often hitching/lagging for a split second when launching clips, making it seems rough and 'unfinished'. This gives a smooth and polished feel when playing the clips.

This is awesome. No more need to fire-up some heavy graphical user interface just to listen to audio streams! (Sorry I couldn't do this, due to a complete lack of free time here!) The only thing lacking, instructions how to install mplayer.exe and instructions concerning how to use with Cygwin. Basically, the mplayer.exe goes within your $PATH. I'm not sure where the other sub-folders should reside, but I simply created a symbolic link using Cygwin for my usage here. (ie. See below Cygwin Instructions) Initial execution of mplayer.exe seemed to search all of Windows fonts. Successive exections of mplayer.exe appeared to forgo the font searching, resulting in the usual quick start of the program. For cygwin users: 1) Unpackage the mplayer package to a folder. 2) Start cygwin and make sure you have a local bin folder (ie. /home/user/bin) within your path. If not, create the folder and modify your local $PATH to include your /home/user/bin folder, replacing the 'user' with your user name. 3) Type 'ln -s /place/where/you/unpackaged/mplayer/mplayer.exe /home/user/bin/' 4) If you prefer using .exe' command suffixes or are required to, and you have 'mplayer' aliases within you Linux bashrc and are copying the Linux bashrc over to Windows' Cygwin, then open the bashrc file within vim and type ':%s/mplayer /mplayer.exe /gc' without quotes. The command will aide in replacing the 'mplayer ' with 'mplayer.exe '. Most Cygwin users can skip this as Cygwin seems to recognize commands without the '.exe' suffix!

Nice work ! Version 37051 has not any more WMV bug. Really nice Job ! Don't stop working on mplayer, i use it everyday for a project i'll publish soon... Thanks again ;)

Application X-mplayer2 Downloads

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[componentplanet]

DS9 Upscale Project Update: What I’ve Been Working On

It’s been several months since I wrote an update on my ongoing efforts to restore Deep Space Nine. I took a break from the project through much of June due to a move and an associated injury but jumped back into it in July and have been at work steadily since then. The majority have my time has been focused on understanding how shifting the episode into various alternative frame rates would impact motion smoothness and image quality.

In the past, I’ve written updates when I hit specific milestones I’d set for myself or discovered something I thought was interesting. This is more of a progress report. So, to begin: A bit of recap: I’m a lifelong Deep Space Nine fan who started this project in January and has pursued it since. I’ve been learning about video processing and encoding from scratch as I’ve worked, and according to everyone I’ve talked to, I didn’t pick a beginner-level project.

Deep Space Nine is a VFR (Variable Frame Rate) show, which means the DVD alternates between playing back at 23.976 fps and 29.97 fps at various points within the episode. This is a common format for late-1990s science fiction. Shows encoded in this fashion include Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek: The Next Generation (DVD-only), and Star Trek: Voyager.

The episode of Deep Space Nine I chose to treat as my test vehicle, “Sacrifice of Angels,” is about 14 percent 29.97fps footage and ~86 percent 23.976fps footage. The problem is, applications like AviSynth cannot edit VFR video and must convert it to CFR (Constant Frame Rate). Applications like DaVinci Studio Resolve can technically “handle” VFR files, in that it will ingest them properly, but the resulting output periodically pauses in a way I couldn’t find a clean solution for. For now, unless I figure that out, processing the show requires that it be converted to CFR as an initial step.

If you encode a VFR show at 23.976 CFR, the 29.97fps content will be cut to 23.976fps and the playback may not be perfectly smooth. In some cases, you won’t see any stutter because there’s not enough motion on screen for the frame decimation to be visible. There’s a several-minute block of 29.97fps content in “Sacrifice of Angels” when Dukat, Dumar, Weyoun, and the female Changeling are all talking at Ops. While there are a few telltale signs, you only really see it when Dukat walks around the table — and this is after both postprocessing and upscale.

The reason that Dukat’s hand and body are blurred as he moves is that, if you go frame-by-frame, what he’s doing looks like this:

I boosted the brightness a bit here, to make the shadow easier to see. Most of the frame looks normal, but you can see where Dukat’s hand is going to be in the next frame. The error is visible but small and confined to one part of the screen.

The fact that a lot of TNG-era Star Trek is conversation makes the frame rate shifts that much easier to deal with, but it’s still noticeable as heck when it happens. My goal has been to find an automated method of processing DS9 that would typically produce better motion during 29.97fps content sections. I spent the last few months playing with various methods of converting the show’s frame rate to see what the options would look like.

Source Sensitivity

The transmutative property of mathematics states that when you multiply two numbers together, it doesn’t matter what order you write the numbers in. 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 = 24. So does 4 * 3 * 2 * 1. Video processing is not transmutative. The order in which you apply filters changes what the final output will be. Video processing workflows need to be duplicated exactly in order to guarantee accurate results, up to and potentially including using the exact same application and filter versions.

There are a few reasons I’ve been exploring the outcomes for Handbrake and MakeMKV as opposed to using DVD Decrypter to create a VOB copy of the DVD data in 59.94 interlaced format.

First and foremost, I’ve yet to figure out how to get the video output quality to look anywhere near as good as what I’ve achieved with HB/MMKV without creating scripts for each episode. In point of fact, I haven’t completely figured out the episode scripting, either. This is what I get for taking my last programming course circa “I Want It That Way.”

While we’re being honest, I want it this way, but we don’t get everything we want, do we ViacomCBS? Image from the “What We Left Behind” DS9 documentary, showing what a remastered Defiant would look like.

My own best. Spoiler: The professional one is better.

Second, Handbrake offered some really simple options to batch up and test a huge range of file encode presets. In mid-July, I ripped “Sacrifice of Angels” more than 250 separate times in Handbrake in order to examine the impact of various quality control settings, H.264 flags, frame rates, and deinterlacing options. Third, I finally figured out how to hand StaxRip a set of flags that would synchronize the audio/video playback of a VFR MakeMKV file, and I wanted to experiment with it. Finally, part of learning something is figuring out what not to do. I make a lot of mistakes and I make some of them on purpose, just to see how various ideas change the final output.

I have spent a great deal of time during the last two months playing with various methods of changing frame rates. AviSynth has a number of filters for changing the frame rate and different source filters yield subtly different outputs. I’ve experimented with various methods of interpolating up to 119.88fps before trimming back down — either to a compromise frame rate like 59.97 or back to 23.976. I’ve done a lot of testing combining a pass through Davinci Studio Resolve through further processing with AviSynth, or before AviSynth, or after. I’ve experimented with various H.264 quality levels and specific presets to look at the impact these would have on the areas of troublesome motion in the show. To be honest, I worked out a strategy for what I wanted to encode and allowed the encoding to race ahead of my actual evaluations. I’m still evaluating what I’ve created. If any of these methods had yielded a single clear winner, I’d have said so, but I’ve certainly seen some intriguing differences among the data. I’ve even played with some of the AI-based methods of interpolation to see how they’d compare.

Separately from this, I’ve experimented with deinterlacing based on 59.97 VOB files. Even with script help from some of the community at Doom 9, I haven’t found a single, broad, fire-and-forget solution that gave me as clear an image quality as what I’ve gotten from MakeMKV and Handbrake. Part of the reason I chose to stick with these sources when evaluating motion is that I knew I’d already achieved something reasonably close to what I’d consider final quality. I wanted to hold that set of variables constant and experiment with the methods I’d already worked with, especially when I had trouble achieving the same image quality. Still hoping to find one, but that’s why I chose to focus my time where I did.

The Pros and Cons of 119.88fps

One way of solving the 23.976fps and 29.97fps playback problem is to shift content up to 119.88fps. The problem with 119.88 — well, one of them, because there’s not just a problem — is that you’ve definitionally quintupled your workload. If it takes 15 wall-clock hours of mixed CPU and GPU processing time to upscale an episode of 23.976 DS9, it’ll take ~75 hours for 119.88.

That’s not great. And to add insult to injury, you need a 120Hz display to watch the output without dropping half the frames.

I’m still messing around with 119.88, because so far I’ve gotten the best overall results in those troublesome patches at this frame rate, but it’s hard to imagine attempting to do the show this way. Ampere would have to be more than 2x faster than the GTX 1080 Ti to make the GPU processing times anything near reasonable.

Alternatively, one can attempt a frame rate between 23.976 and 119.88, and I’ve been doing some experimenting there as well. These frame rates all require either the film or video portion of the material to shift playback speed by a non-integer multiplier, which means there’s always some degree of detectable something. What varies is just what that something is, and how often it pops up. I’ve also tested the outcomes if you upscale the video first, then process it. The end results are pretty good, but the clock time penalty for processing 2560×1920 clips versus 720×480 clips is larger than the resolution increase alone would suggest.

Where This Is Going

My plan is to assemble a set of options that make some reasonable tradeoffs as far as motion smoothness versus processing time versus frame rate, with at least two and possibly three targets. I’ve also been experimenting with masking and antialiasing lately, including using a version of an episode with fewer aliasing problems as an external antialiasing guide for a version of the same episode optimized for smoother motion. And it works!

…ish.

One of the things I’ve learned is that when searching for a best-fit line that will safely adjust a television show, you may be very lucky to find a single method that works for an episode. Asking for a method that globally works well for 176 episodes is asking a lot.

Most of the time, what you get is…ish, and some things are a heck of a lot ‘ishier’ than others. The external clip concept is interesting, but after playing around with it for a little while I’ve got my doubts about whether it can work. There are scenes that it transforms as perfectly as I could ask for — and scenes that, uh, don’t.

This is what “Don’t” looks like.

I suppose a pertinent question to y’all would be: How much of what doesn’t work are you curious to see in the first place? I haven’t posted or talked much about failed experiments to date, and the reason this story doesn’t have more video is that I’m not sure what people would find interesting in the first place. It doesn’t seem all that interesting to just talk about what doesn’t work. If you find this sort of work-in-progress more interesting, or if you’d find it more interesting if I gave you more to look at, say so.

Now Read:

Deep Space Nine Upscale Project Season Finale: What We’ve Brought Ahead

Deep Space Nine Upscale Project (DS9UP): Technical Goals and FAQ

Upscaling Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Using Topaz Video Enhance AI

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/313963-ds9-upscale-project-update-what-ive-been-working-on from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/08/ds9-upscale-project-update-what-ive.html

[etechwire-blog]

Best Linux terminal emulators of 2018

New Post has been published on https://www.etechwire.com/best-linux-terminal-emulators-of-2018/

Best Linux terminal emulators of 2018

The terminal is the beating heart of Linux, no matter how hard today’s user-friendly graphical distros might try to push it into the background. If you need something done quickly and efficiently, chances are the best way to do it is with some complex keyboard wrangling. Exactly what to type is beyond the scope of this article – check out our guide here to get yourself started.

The key, if you’re a terminal-slinging Linux badass, is to make sure you type those commands with as much style and panache as possible. And while you’ll likely never be in a position where you’re not able to drop to a straight full-screen shell, having a quick window to the command line on your desktop is always handy.

Of course, your Linux distribution will have a ‘Terminal’ application already such as xterm, Gnome Shell or Konsole – but this probably isn’t as good as your emulator could be. Let’s refresh your view of those plain old white-on-black characters, as we explore our top six Linux Terminal emulators.

1. Cool Retro Term

If you have a bunch of CPU cycles and graphics processing power that needs using up, you’re sure to get a kick out of Cool Retro Term. It emulates the look of a really old-school cathode ray monitor, complete with phosphorous glow, burn-in, and bloom around the characters. If you cut your teeth with the monochrome screens of the early eighties, this is a nostalgic (and highly customisable) trip back to the past.

You can even select between a number of character sets, evoking memories of (for example) the all-caps Apple II, as well as selecting between a number of colours to replicate the amber warmth of classic Zenith monitors, or a rarely-used but nonetheless beautiful cyan.

While the usefulness of some of its features is questionable – particularly the optional screen jitter replicating a slightly dodgy signal cable, and some of the older fonts – Cool Retro Term (CRT) is a beautiful toy to play with.

2. Guake

This Terminal emulator, crafted specifically for Gnome, takes inspiration from the classic shooter Quake, as its name suggests. Guake doesn’t offer you quad or mega-health power-ups, red armour, or even come branded with Quake’s classic brown-on-brown colour scheme, thankfully. Instead, it apes the behaviour of Quake’s console, un-hiding itself and dropping down from the top of the screen when you hit a hotkey.

This behaviour is highly useful, particularly when you’re working with a small screen. There’s no need to keep a window open, hunt around for the Terminal icon when you need to type something useful, or check your performance in htop. Just tap [F12] to bring it down, or [F11] to make it full-screen, and you’re away.

Guake also comes with a selection of neat colour schemes, giving you a few stylish options. There are similar options for other desktops, too: check out the likes of YaKuake for KDE or the GTK-based tilda.

3. Terminator

How much street cred does a single Terminal window actually afford you? Every command line warrior worth his or her salt is jumping between a number of different sessions for different tasks, has one eye on htop (or similar) at all times to manage system resources, and so on.

There are actual shell-based options for this – GNU Screen, for example, or tmux – and Gnome Terminal allows you to open extra tabs and flick between them. But Terminator, which borrows much of its code from Gnome Terminal and tends to update as soon as its parent does, splits up your different sessions into individual panes within a single Terminal app.

This means you can have everything open and available at one time – keep an eye on stats, watch a text-mode clock like vtclock, edit docs in nano, run whatever commands you need, all from one grid interface which can be tweaked as your needs require.

4. Terminology

Some people lean on the Terminal as their default method of Linux navigation, which can be a little restrictive. Normally you’d hunt down a file, then have to jump to a graphical desktop application to preview it, unless it’s a plain text document. That isn’t the case with EFL-based Terminology, an app which celebrates the Terminal while doing away with its more irritating old-school features.

Files, URLs and email addresses can be automatically previewed in Terminology’s window. Click an image, or a video, and you’ll be shown a preview within the Terminal itself. It supports panes (known as ‘splits’) in much the same way as Terminator, and can be customised. Why not apply an individual background image or colour scheme to each split, or fiddle with the transparency for that late nineties ‘look what Linux can do’ vibe?

The options are all there, with text mode triggers and a vast number of settings tucked away in its context menus.

5. st (simple terminal)

One of Linux’s big problems is that it sometimes does a bit too much. Your chosen Terminal emulator is probably compatible with a whole raft of obscure, archaic and/or unused commands.

This can become very messy as Linux code tends to pass through a lot of hands before being released. It doesn’t have to be that way, though: st is a simple Terminal emulator that does precisely what it’s meant to do and little else. 

Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s all that simple, though, despite the name (st stands for Simple Terminal). There’s still support for all the colours you could ask for, clipboard handling, a full UTF-8 character set, and a lot of font customisation options including antialiasing. 

If you’re not one for Terminal frippery and would prefer a more straightforward environment, this is most definitely the one for you.

6. rxvt-unicode

Also known as urxvt, this is the Terminal emulator which many veteran Linux users end up going with. Not because it has pretty graphics or gimmicks, but due to the fact that it’s absolutely rock solid and free of glitches. 

That’s not to say it doesn’t do fancy things: it supports colours, unicode, customisable fonts with italics and bold if required, and even transparency. The main program runs as a daemon, meaning it neatly conserves system resources when you’re running multiple windows over multiple desktops.

It’s very difficult to cause rxvt-unicode to crash, and that’s its main selling point – even if you’re playing with a more visual Terminal program, having this installed for when it’s time to get serious is a clever choice. Do note, though, that you may need to edit the hardware configuration file to customise it to your needs.

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[componentplanet]

How Do Graphics Cards Work?

Ever since 3dfx debuted the original Voodoo accelerator, no single piece of equipment in a PC has had as much of an impact on whether your machine could game as the humble graphics card. While other components absolutely matter, a top-end PC with 32GB of RAM, a $4,000 CPU, and PCIe-based storage will choke and die if asked to run modern AAA titles on a ten-year-old card at modern resolutions and detail levels. Graphics cards, aka GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are critical to game performance and we cover them extensively. But we don’t often dive into what makes a GPU tick and how the cards function.

By necessity, this will be a high-level overview of GPU functionality and cover information common to AMD, Nvidia, and Intel’s integrated GPUs, as well as any discrete cards Intel might build in the future based on the Xe architecture. It should also be common to the mobile GPUs built by Apple, Imagination Technologies, Qualcomm, ARM, and other vendors.

Why Don’t We Run Rendering With CPUs?

The first point I want to address is why we don’t use CPUs for rendering workloads in gaming in the first place. The honest answer to this question is that you can run rendering workloads directly on a CPU. Early 3D games that predate the widespread availability of graphics cards, like Ultima Underworld, ran entirely on the CPU. UU is a useful reference case for multiple reasons — it had a more advanced rendering engine than games like Doom, with full support for looking up and down, as well as then-advanced features like texture mapping. But this kind of support came at a heavy price — many people lacked a PC that could actually run the game.

Ultima Underworld. Image by GOG

In the early days of 3D gaming, many titles like Half-Life and Quake II featured a software renderer to allow players without 3D accelerators to play the title. But the reason we dropped this option from modern titles is simple: CPUs are designed to be general-purpose microprocessors, which is another way of saying they lack the specialized hardware and capabilities that GPUs offer. A modern CPU could easily handle titles that tended to stutter when running in software 18 years ago, but no CPU on Earth could easily handle a modern AAA game from today if run in that mode. Not, at least, without some drastic changes to the scene, resolution, and various visual effects.

As a fun example of this: The Threadripper 3990X is capable of running Crysis in software mode, albeit not all that well.

What’s a GPU?

A GPU is a device with a set of specific hardware capabilities that are intended to map well to the way that various 3D engines execute their code, including geometry setup and execution, texture mapping, memory access, and shaders. There’s a relationship between the way 3D engines function and the way GPU designers build hardware. Some of you may remember that AMD’s HD 5000 family used a VLIW5 architecture, while certain high-end GPUs in the HD 6000 family used a VLIW4 architecture. With GCN, AMD changed its approach to parallelism, in the name of extracting more useful performance per clock cycle.

Nvidia first coined the term “GPU” with the launch of the original GeForce 256 and its support for performing hardware transform and lighting calculations on the GPU (this corresponded, roughly to the launch of Microsoft’s DirectX 7). Integrating specialized capabilities directly into hardware was a hallmark of early GPU technology. Many of those specialized technologies are still employed (in very different forms). It’s more power-efficient and faster to have dedicated resources on-chip for handling specific types of workloads than it is to attempt to handle all of the work in a single array of programmable cores.

There are a number of differences between GPU and CPU cores, but at a high level, you can think about them like this. CPUs are typically designed to execute single-threaded code as quickly and efficiently as possible. Features like SMT / Hyper-Threading improve on this, but we scale multi-threaded performance by stacking more high-efficiency single-threaded cores side-by-side. AMD’s 64-core / 128-thread Epyc CPUs are the largest you can buy today. To put that in perspective, the lowest-end Pascal GPU from Nvidia has 384 cores, while the highest core-count x86 CPU on the market tops out at 64. A “core” in GPU parlance is a much smaller processor.

Note: You cannot compare or estimate relative gaming performance between AMD, Nvidia, and Intel simply by comparing the number of GPU cores. Within the same GPU family (for example, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 10 series, or AMD’s RX 4xx or 5xx family), a higher GPU core count means that GPU is more powerful than a lower-end card. Comparisons based on FLOPS are suspect for reasons discussed here.

The reason you can’t draw immediate conclusions on GPU performance between manufacturers or core families based solely on core counts is that different architectures are more and less efficient. Unlike CPUs, GPUs are designed to work in parallel. Both AMD and Nvidia structure their cards into blocks of computing resources. Nvidia calls these blocks an SM (Streaming Multiprocessor), while AMD refers to them as a Compute Unit.

A Pascal Streaming Multiprocessor (SM).

Each block contains a group of cores, a scheduler, a register file, instruction cache, texture and L1 cache, and texture mapping units. The SM / CU can be thought of as the smallest functional block of the GPU. It doesn’t contain literally everything — video decode engines, render outputs required for actually drawing an image on-screen, and the memory interfaces used to communicate with onboard VRAM are all outside its purview — but when AMD refers to an APU as having 8 or 11 Vega Compute Units, this is the (equivalent) block of silicon they’re talking about. And if you look at a block diagram of a GPU, any GPU, you’ll notice that it’s the SM/CU that’s duplicated a dozen or more times in the image.

And here’s Pascal, full-fat edition.

The higher the number of SM/CU units in a GPU, the more work it can perform in parallel per clock cycle. Rendering is a type of problem that’s sometimes referred to as “embarrassingly parallel,” meaning it has the potential to scale upwards extremely well as core counts increase.

When we discuss GPU designs, we often use a format that looks something like this: 4096:160:64. The GPU core count is the first number. The larger it is, the faster the GPU, provided we’re comparing within the same family (GTX 970 versus GTX 980 versus GTX 980 Ti, RX 560 versus RX 580, and so on).

Texture Mapping and Render Outputs

There are two other major components of a GPU: texture mapping units and render outputs. The number of texture mapping units in a design dictates its maximum texel output and how quickly it can address and map textures on to objects. Early 3D games used very little texturing because the job of drawing 3D polygonal shapes was difficult enough. Textures aren’t actually required for 3D gaming, though the list of games that don’t use them in the modern age is extremely small.

The number of texture mapping units in a GPU is signified by the second figure in the 4096:160:64 metric. AMD, Nvidia, and Intel typically shift these numbers equivalently as they scale a GPU family up and down. In other words, you won’t really find a scenario where one GPU has a 4096:160:64 configuration while a GPU above or below it in the stack is a 4096:320:64 configuration. Texture mapping can absolutely be a bottleneck in games, but the next-highest GPU in the product stack will typically offer at least more GPU cores and texture mapping units (whether higher-end cards have more ROPs depends on the GPU family and the card configuration).

Render outputs (also sometimes called raster operations pipelines) are where the GPU’s output is assembled into an image for display on a monitor or television. The number of render outputs multiplied by the clock speed of the GPU controls the pixel fill rate. A higher number of ROPs means that more pixels can be output simultaneously. ROPs also handle antialiasing, and enabling AA — especially supersampled AA — can result in a game that’s fill-rate limited.

Memory Bandwidth, Memory Capacity

The last components we’ll discuss are memory bandwidth and memory capacity. Memory bandwidth refers to how much data can be copied to and from the GPU’s dedicated VRAM buffer per second. Many advanced visual effects (and higher resolutions more generally) require more memory bandwidth to run at reasonable frame rates because they increase the total amount of data being copied into and out of the GPU core.

In some cases, a lack of memory bandwidth can be a substantial bottleneck for a GPU. AMD’s APUs like the Ryzen 5 3400G are heavily bandwidth-limited, which means increasing your DDR4 clock rate can have a substantial impact on overall performance. The choice of game engine can also have a substantial impact on how much memory bandwidth a GPU needs to avoid this problem, as can a game’s target resolution.

The total amount of on-board memory is another critical factor in GPUs. If the amount of VRAM needed to run at a given detail level or resolution exceeds available resources, the game will often still run, but it’ll have to use the CPU’s main memory for storing additional texture data — and it takes the GPU vastly longer to pull data out of DRAM as opposed to its onboard pool of dedicated VRAM. This leads to massive stuttering as the game staggers between pulling data from a quick pool of local memory and general system RAM.

One thing to be aware of is that GPU manufacturers will sometimes equip a low-end or midrange card with more VRAM than is otherwise standard as a way to charge a bit more for the product. We can’t make an absolute prediction as to whether this makes the GPU more attractive because honestly, the results vary depending on the GPU in question. What we can tell you is that in many cases, it isn’t worth paying more for a card if the only difference is a larger RAM buffer. As a rule of thumb, lower-end GPUs tend to run into other bottlenecks before they’re choked by limited available memory. When in doubt, check reviews of the card and look for comparisons of whether a 2GB version is outperformed by the 4GB flavor or whatever the relevant amount of RAM would be. More often than not, assuming all else is equal between the two solutions, you’ll find the higher RAM loadout not worth paying for.

Check out our ExtremeTech Explains series for more in-depth coverage of today’s hottest tech topics.

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from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/269335-how-graphics-cards-work from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/04/how-do-graphics-cards-work.html