3d graphics articles

The 3D games we play and love are all made up of thousands, if not millions, of colored straight lines, which inevitably will look jagged in our screens if not for smoothing anti-aliasing techniques. Let us explain in this new deep dive.

In our last installment of the history of the modern graphics processor, we had reached a point where the market consisted of just three competitors: AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. However, in the following years, graphics processors became one of the largest, most complex, and most expensive components that could be found in almost any computing device.

When it comes to graphics cards, more is nearly always better. More shaders, more RAM, more bandwidth. So how about more GPUs? Here's a brief stroll through the story of multi-GPU graphics cards.

The vast majority of visual effects you see in games today depend on the clever use of lighting and shadows – without them, games would be dull and lifeless. In this fourth part of our deep look at 3D game rendering, we'll focus on what happens to a 3D world alongside processing vertices and applying textures. It once again involves a lot of math and a sound grasp of the fundamentals of optics.

Inside the latest graphics cards lies a large graphics processor, packed with billions of transistors, all running at clock speeds unthinkable a decade ago. Welcome to our architectural comparison of the newest GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.

In this third part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing what can happen to the 3D world after the vertex processing has done and the scene has been rasterized. The majority of the visual effects seen in games today are down to the clever use of textures – without them, games would dull and lifeless. So let's get dive in and see how this all works!

In this second part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing what happens to the 3D world after all of the vertex processing has finished. We'll need to dust off our math textbooks again, grapple with the geometry of frustums, and ponder the puzzle of perspectives. We'll also take a quick dive into the physics of ray tracing, lighting and materials – excellent!

In this first part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing entirely on the vertex stage of the process. This means dragging out our math textbooks, brushing up on a spot of linear algebra, matrices, and trigonometry – oh yeah!