Graphics Components

Optical lens systems suffer from non-linear radial distortion. Image-based applications require distortion compensation for the accurate location, registration and measurement of image features, and a real-time capability is desirable for interactive systems. A texture-mapping graphics accelerator can use corresponding meshes of distorted and undistorted nodes along with the dynamic distorted image to render high quality distortion-corrected images at video frame rates. Mesh generation, an error analysis, and performance results are presented. The proposed polar-based method is shown to have both more accuracy than a conventional grid-based approach and greater speed than the traditional method of using the CPU to transform each pixel individually. tech news

Rendering performance in 3D scenes can be improved dramatically through the use of an OpenGL graphics card. OpenGL is an industry-standard, cross-platform, 3D graphics application programming interface (API). Cards supporting this API offload compute-intensive tasks from the CPU and perform the operations in specialized hardware. A proper graphics card and graphics driver configuration is all that's necessary for 3D graphics performance to be improved in ESRI ArcGIS 3D Analyst. tech news

Probably the single most fast-paced sector within the computer industry is the graphics cards market, especially where high-end products are concerned. Upon its introduction in the first quarter of this year, the GeForce4 Ti was able to retake the speed crown for NVIDIA, uncontested. The only card a GeForce4 Ti needs fear is the home-made competition. The GeForce4 4600 range of graphics cards offer excellent performance, but is one of them right for you? This depends on quite a few factors - in addition to the price and 3D performance, there's the video quality and the noise of the cooling fan to consider as well. tech news

The recent popular fascination with ATI's Radeon 8500 has created a serious threat to Nvidia's supremacy. Nvidia's response is to replace their GeForce2 and GeForce3 models with slightly modified versions, and give them the attractive Titanium suffix 'Ti'. The intention was to make everybody believe the Titanium chips would be significantly better. However, regardless of the newer-and-cooler name, there is nothing really exciting behind this - Nvidia simply combined the release of a new and considerably faster driver version (the Detonator 4) with a slight modification of their GeForce3 chip. tech news

With the release of the AGP 3.0 standard there has been an influx of 8X AGP cards hitting the market. During the transition period from AGP 2.0 to 3.0 one will see both AGP 4X and 8 X in the market and many of these cards will look very similar. This paper helps one clarify the difference between the two types of card. tech news