The Ultimate Graphics Card

I often wonder how life would be like if we could use technology to extract data from the human brain as we see in movies. Like lodging a microchip into the brain that can transmit imagery from the things we imagine, dream or remember, and even text from the things we think.

Life would not be private, but maybe crime could be controlled. But on a darker note, the nature of every human would be exposed. On the upside, we could create our own graphics from the imagination and transmit those images electronically directly from the brain to devices. Graphic designing on a whole new level.

There would be more astounding consequences on ICT. The way we communicate via social media would be almost telepathic.

So anyway, this has sparked curiosity on how graphics cards work because a graphics card is lodged onto the motherboard so that the CPU (the brain of the computer) can translate binary data into an image you can see on the screen (Tyson and Wilson, 2001).

Jeff Tyson and Tracy Wilson describe how the graphics card receives information about the image from the CPU that is carrying out instructions from a software application. It then decides how to use the pixels on the screen to create the image before sending that information to the screen through a cable.

They also explain how the graphics card bears the load of creating an image out of binary data because this is too demanding of a process for the CPU. It uses a motherboard connection for data and power (however newer cards need more power so they also have a direct connection to the computer's power supply), a processor to decide what to do with each pixel on the screen, memory to hold information about each pixel and to temporarily store completed pictures, and a monitor connection so you can see the final result.

A graphics card is a printed circuit board like the motherboard and houses the Graphic's Processing Unit (GPU) and RAM for memory and a BIOS chip (Tyson and Wilson, 2001). The GPU is like a CPU except it does the complex mathematical and geometric calculations specifically to render graphics. The RAM connects directly to the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) which translates the image into an analog signal that the monitor (screen) can use thus sending the final picture to the screen through a cable.

If we had a graphics card lodged in our brains, we would need biotechnology to transfer the information about the images we conjure in the brain to the graphics card to an external device. Wouldn't that be neat?

References:

Tyson, J. and Wilson T.V. (2001) How Graphics Cards Work [online] Available from: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/graphics-card.htm [Accessed on 8 October 2018]