Rendering Hardware

Rendering Hardware

API is any defined inter-program interface, video acceleration API is a software which provides access to graphics hardware acceleration for video processing. Accelerated processing includes rendering and video decoding aswell as subpicture blending.

VA API was ment to someday replace XvMC which is the unix equilivent of the microsoft windows directX video acceleration. The Motivation for VA API is to enable accelerated video decode at verious entry-points for the standards today which are MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP/H.263, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, and VC-1/VMW3. Extending XvMC was considered but due to its design for MPEG-2 only, it made more sense to design a fresh interface that could fully expose the decoding abilitys of todays GPU’S.

A GPU is a graphics processing unit, they are dedicated graphics rendering devices for a P.C, Workstation or Games Console. Modern GPU’S are extremely efficient at displaying computer graphics.The Higly parellell structure of them makes them more effective than general purpose CPU’s for a range of complex algorithms. A GPU can sit on top of a video card, or it can be integrated Directly into the motherboard . in more than 90% of computers integrated GPU’s are far less powerfull than the add ins.

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

A shader in the field of Computer graphics is a set of software instructions, which is used by graphic resourses mostly to perform Rendering effects.Shaders are used to llow a 3d Application Designer to program the GPU “programmable pipeline”, which is used alot more than the older “fixed-function pipeline”, allowing more flexibility making the most out of the GPU’s abilitys.
A render engine is a process which generates an image from a model.  The main model is a description of 3D objects from a data structure. The image contans information from points such as geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading.

Silicon graphics are considered to play such a key role in the development of hardware renderers as silicon graphics were the founders of Open GL graphics.

James Clarke is a very well know business man who specialises in computer science. In more recent times he has founded several notiable companies such as Silicon Graphics, Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, myCFO and Healtheon.
He is one of the most notable founders in computer graphics is because his research into computer graphics led to the development of systems for the fast rendering of computer images.

OPEN GL

• The Open GL Shader is cross Platform,

• Open GL is very portable and is able to be used in a variety of situations and is very straight forward to use.

• Open GL is unlikely to evolve at a fast rate.

DIRECT X

• DirectX supports a greater set of features.

• DirectX gives programmers a great deal of control over the rendering pipeline if they want it.  DirectX 9.0 features programmable pixel and vertex shaders

• Direct X has better support for modern chipset features.

• Direct X also is very straightforward however, this is not cross platform like the open GL, where as the direct X can in many cases only work on the Windows Platform.

• However it has some driver issues.

• DirectX is not portable and probably never will be.