The XBox 360 Graphics Processor
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Mac_Jones]Mac Jones
The XBox 360 from computer giant Microsoft was launched in 2005 as a successor to the original XBox games console. At the heart of every gaming machine are the two main processing elements, the central processing unit (CPU) and the graphics processing unit (GPU). In this article we take a look at the 360's GPU.
The graphics processor is responsible for the picture drawing capabilities of the console and basically takes the raw data from the game and turns it into stunning high-resolution images. By dealing with the bulk of the graphics processing the GPU frees up the CPU to deal with other tasks.
The GPU in the XBox 360 is called Xenos and was custom designed by graphics experts ATI, who have many years experience with PC based graphics cards. Xenos contains two separate silicon chips, each with a clock speed of 500 MHz and sharing 10 MB of DRAM for the main memory. The GPU is manufactured by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, one of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world.
While a 500 MHz processor combined with 10 MB of DRAM provides plenty of power for the 360, the main feature of the GPU is that it uses unified shader architecture.
Shaders are like filters that are applied to the bare 3D objects that have been rendered by the GPU. Their purpose is to make them look more realistic when they are displayed on your screen. Shaders can be divided into two types, pixel and vertex shaders. Pixel shaders adjust the lighting, colour and surface textures of each pixel in order to manipulate the look of 3D objects that are constructed from these pixels. They often serve to smooth out the basic 3D objects to give them a more realistic look.
Vertex shaders process the basic graphics produced by the GPU in order to add special effects to objects in a 3D environment. They do this by performing mathematical operations on an objects vertex data, which is in simple terms its position in relation other objects in the picture, its colour and its texture. By manipulating these values an object can be made to look different to suit the environment it is being displayed in or the requirements of the games developers.
These shaders make billions of computations every second in order to achieve the required output. Traditionally the two types of sharer had to be processed one after the other, meaning complex graphics took at lot of resources to generate. This is where ATI's unified shader architecture comes into play as with this technology both shader types can be processed at the same time. This allows the XBox 360 to process 48 billion shader operations per second, giving it unprecedented graphics processing power on its release.
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