Benchmark user interface:

Understanding and Improving Performance of 3D Graphics
Card and Applications

Liu Ren (liuren@cs.cmu.edu)
Hua Zhong (zhonghh@cs.cmu.edu)

Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University

1 Introduction
1.1 Importance of Graphics Hardware

In the recent three years, the graphics hardware may be the most active part in computer
hardware market with new generations of chips appeared almost every 3 months. The newest
graphics cards are equipped with a Graphics Process Unit (GPU) and very fast memory with
bandwidth over 8.0GB. Now the GPU has as many as
4 pipelines that can work parallel, and programmable
shaders that can take some workload from CPU. So
the graphics cards now is much more complex than it
is used to be and more advanced functions and
sophistic architectures have been introduced into
graphics cards. Hardware manufacturers such as
Nvidia and ATI have invented many new features to
make their cards run faster and faster. Now buying a
PC, one must consider the importance of graphics card
as much as CPU! Along with the great improvements
of graphics hardware, demands for more realistic 3D
games to exploit the fast speed of graphics chips also
Figure 1 XBox’s game DoA3 make the game market one of the most profitable
markets. The newest games of Microsoft’s Xbox
powered by a Nvidia’s special version of GeForce3 graphics chip exceeds everyone’s imagination
of how realistic current real time 3D games could be (Figure 1).
So ...