Video rendering

[ClickHere2Surf.com]

Someone showed me this video and he says it was made by a geforce card.

Isn't it the software that does the video rendering and the quality of the video has nothing to do with the video card? Doesnt the video card only affect speed of redering?

Thanks

[GokuSS2]

Originally posted by ClickHere2Surf.com
Someone showed me this video and he says it was made by a geforce card.

Isn't it the software that does the video rendering and the quality of the video has nothing to do with the video card? Doesnt the video card only affect speed of redering?

Thanks

Most if not all consumer video cards have nothing to do with video rendering.

[ShadowWynd]

It depends completely on how it is rendered.

If you are using a program like Maya or Strata or Rhino3D or StudioMax (or Blender, or Bryce, or Lightwave, etc) the graphics card does not make any difference at all. You may notice a big increase in real-time preview speed, but in the actual rendering (the frame by frame raytracing) the only thing that matters is the CPU speed and memory. The "picture" is generated by simulating thousands of rays of light bouncing off the items in the scene.

That said, if you are using an OpenGL/DirectX program that does screen capture or something similar, the picture is taken at the end of the graphics pipeline. For instance, you build your scene, set the textures, and assign environmental attributes such as fog, radiosity, antialiasing, and reflection. This is very simple to do, you basically are giving the GPU a set of things to draw, but not specifying HOW to draw them. The GPU then generates the image, and sends the image out on the back end of the GPU, from where it is sent to the monitor. Both OpenGL and DirectX have a means by which an image can be grabbed off the back end and saved as a file on the disk. In this case, all the rendering is done by the GPU. Having a bigger/faster video card with more features (such as fog buffers, texture memory, antialiasing) would make a very big difference in both the quality and speed of a render in this mode. Some modeling programs have a "OpenGL Mode", in this case, the video card makes all the difference, based on the GPU.

As an example, I am doing good if I can get 1 frame, antialiased, at 720x480 resolution, every 20 seconds with my raytracer. Unreal Tournament 2003, on the other hand, can crank out 60 fps at 1024x768. This is because the Unreal engine is not responsible for drawing the images like the raytracer engine is. The Unreal engine is responsible to get the terrain and character information to the GPU. The Unreal Engine assumes that the people at Nvidia and ATI have spent many dollars building a GPU whose only task in life is to create an image and get it to the monitor many times a second. A frame grab from a program like this is simply reading off the back end of the video card.