September 24, 2012 • 34 mins
What is a GPU? What are GPUs used for besides processing graphics? Who makes video cards? In this episode, Jonathan and Chris break down the nuts and bolts of GPUs.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready, are you hey there? Tech stuff listeners, This
is Jonathan Strickland, and I wanted to talk to you
a little bit about something cool going on at how
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(00:22):
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Let us know how creative you are. You can go
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see what you got. Get in touch with technology with
(00:45):
tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette
and I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
Sitting across from me, as is senior writer Jonathan he there,
and I want to warn you all today's episode maybe
(01:06):
graphic that's correct, it's about graphics cards. We have received
lots of questions and requests for us to do an
episode about graphics cards, some of which hounded us through
multiple forms of media. And so today you get your wish,
we're gonna talk about graphics cards. These are the things
(01:27):
that got me into console gaming, which is true. No, So, Chris,
you and I remember, I mean we were we were
both using computers during the nineties when there was the
kind of revolution in personal computers where and a a
an independent secondary graphics card became a necessity if you
(01:51):
wanted to stay up to date with the latest games
that were coming out. Yeah. I remember with my very
first Amiga how they would talk about there were their
secondary chips on the motherboard that we handle additional operations,
not just the one processor. And I think, um, it
probably seems silly to a lot of us now, like, oh, well,
(02:12):
of course you know that would be important. But you know,
as computing has gone on, we've realized some that although
you have you know, Moore's law, which basically just you know,
talks about computing power growing exponentially, and you say, well, okay,
you know you've got more and more powerful computers, but
we've realized over that time too that although you may
(02:34):
have more powerful processors, Dividing tasks up between multiple processors
is a better way to compute because you can accomplish
more when you divide these jobs, and uh, you know,
it's it's more efficient that way. It's it's very simple. Yeah,
So a graphics card job essentially is to really manipulate
(02:56):
computer memory at a very rapid rate so that information
coming in can be converted into graphic information that's going
to be displayed upon a monitor of some sort. And
it's almost its own computer. Yeah, it's it's it's its
own processor, certainly. And the idea is that this takes
(03:16):
some of that burden from the CPU and it shoulders
it itself so that the CPU can um sort of
become like a manager. The CPU sends the instructions to
the GPU, which then takes care of calculations and and
it's it's designed to do that in a very streamlined,
(03:36):
fast way. And part of that design is this idea
of parallelism, which is what Chris was talking about, where
you have your your chip created in such a way
to process sets of instructions in parallel with each other
because those different sets of instructions don't depend directly on
each other. You know, if you think about computer problem.
(04:00):
One type of computer problem could be an ongoing uh
calculation where the outcome of the previous calculation determines what
the next calculation will be. Right, So we'll just say
that for the first calculation, we're gonna do something really simple.
Just for example, say that the first calculation is two
plus two and the the output is four, and then
(04:24):
the four from that first calculation is used in the
second calculation. Where you have another variable, Well, we'll say
that for the purposes of this problem, that variable is
going to be eight, and whatever the product the whatever
the sum is from that first calculation gets added to eight.
So the the second calculation depends upon the outcome of
(04:45):
the first one. The two plus two is four. Well,
now I've got the the sum of that first calculation four.
I can now add that to eight to get twelve,
and so on and so forth. Well, with all those
calculations depending upon one another, having a single processor makes sense.
You can't really divide that up because you don't know
what the outcome is going to be of a previous calculation,
so you can't move forward until you get that. But
(05:08):
there are other computer problems which we have talked about
several times on this podcast that you can divide up
because they are not interdependent that way, and have a
processor or several processors work on that problem, on those problems,
and the outcome ends up creating whatever it is you
need and UM. In that case, the GPU design was
(05:32):
meant to do that. So we had parallel processors with
GPUs well before you started seeing multi cores in consumer computers. Yeah, yeah,
that's true. By the way, if you run across computers
that offer perpendicular processing, I don't recommend it they I
(05:52):
wasted a lot of money once anyway, being so obtuse UM. Actually,
when you look at the parts of a graphics card,
UM again, they seem rather you know common sense. You've
got a graphics card is its own motherboard, It has
a its own processor on it, UM, and its own memory. UM.
(06:15):
You may actually see, you know, specifications, I remember seeing
specifications for how much v RAM, video RAM or or
graphics memory. UM. That's all part of what you see
on the graphics card. And some graphics cards are you know, customizable.
You can you can add memory. UM depends on your
computer course, and and all of that also depends on
(06:36):
your your the type of graphics card you use depends
heavily upon the kind of motherboard your computer has. That's true.
That's true. Not all motherboards can support all graphics cards.
It depends on especially if you have an older computer.
There comes a point with older computers where the newest
video cards just the old motherboards can't support them. So
(07:01):
that's one thing to keep in mind that the motherboard
your your computer's motherboard has a you know, a shelf
life really and at some point it does become obsolete,
at least in comparison to the latest hardware that comes
or the latest components that are out on the market.
And basically, uh, well, I can't think of a computer
that doesn't have a video output of some kind on it,
(07:22):
even even laptops or ultra books, you know, things that
that are designed to have fewer ports than things because
it's streamlined. Even those machines generally have UM some kind
of video output. Of course, the main one on those
would be at their own screen, but um coming off
of the graphics card. You need to uh to be
(07:43):
able to display the results, so you know, they'll they'll
generally have some kind of connector UM and of course,
key to this all is your operating system, because your
operating system is uh, what is doing basically the traffic management.
So let's say, uh, probably the main reason we talk
(08:03):
about graphics cards these days are for you know, really
three things games, um, high resolution video editing or or
you know, graphics photo editing. You know, those are the
reasons we really talk about the graphics card. I mean,
if you say, yeah, I've got to surf the web
on my computer, you don't go, yeah, but what kind
(08:24):
of graphics card you got, man? I will add I
will add a fourth a fourth yeah, which has nothing
to do with graphics. Okay, it's what people have started
to use GPUs to do. I figured we'd talked about
that way, which goes back to the parallel processing. So
the fourth one, I would say, is parallel processing that
does not necessarily go back to video processing. So and
that can be for lots of different stuff. I know
(08:45):
specifically which one you're thinking about. But because we did
our our episode on on password security and talked about
how GPUs have been used to help crack passwords through
brute force attacks, but they can also be is to
do other parallel processing, not just you know, cryptography, No,
that that's true because UM, well, actually uh we had
(09:06):
talked about it on our our podcast about about the
mac os ten snow Leopard. One of the changes was
that they added the ability to uh um send instructions.
And that's really what I was sort of getting at
with the the operating system is, you know, it's let's
say you're playing a game and uh you know, you
have the game itself, the instructions that are going out
(09:28):
about where your character is and where it's moving across
the screen, and it's sending other instructions about how to
render that on the screen to the graphics processor card,
which takes care of computation for things like the number
of polygons that you see on the screen, how fast
those that information can be displayed. So they work in
(09:49):
concert through the help of the operating system to uh
manage the rest of the stuff and the graphics specific
stuff with the two different the two different cars, and
mac Os ten is able in the newer incarnations of
the operating system is able to uh um, and I
assume that's true for newer versions of Windows and Lenox
(10:10):
as well as you know, able to send instructions to
the graphics cards. So Let's say you are surfing the
web and maybe you have a music playing on you know,
music player service, and you've got email going on, and uh,
you know, five or ten other little things going on
in the background, your calendar software. UM, your graphics card
(10:31):
may not be working over time. So the processing uh,
you know, the the operating system goes, hey, since you're
not busy and you handle some of these other instructions,
kind of take a load off this couch. Yeah, exactly.
So it goes in and helps move the couch, um,
so to speak, and take some of the load off
(10:51):
the main processor, which which is ingenious that any operating
system would be able to do that. Um, And it
just so happens. I know about that one because we
were talking about it in that But you know, the
operating systems have become so much more sophisticated and to
be able to take advantage of that specifically, UM, to
take a load off of the main processors is excellent.
(11:13):
The things that determine how fast a graphics card is, uh,
it's more than just the GPU clock speed of the processors.
So keep in mind the heart of this graphics card
is a processor. We call the GPU. The graphics processing unit.
And and it's it's very similar to a CPU. I
(11:33):
mean that it's job is to crunch data. It's just
in this case most of the time that data has
to do with rendering graphics. UM, so the clock speed
is definitely important. And clock speed, of course, that's generally speaking,
the number of instructions a CPU can carry out within
a second. Uh, that's the number of cycles. Because keeping
(11:56):
in mind that when I say instruction, really instruct it's
really cycles, and some instructions require multiple cycles to complete.
I want to make sure I get that before people
are like, well, you know actually, and people are going
to mention the fact that processors can be overclocked or underclocked. Yeah,
that that speed is a rating that the manufacturer gives
it that basically says, this will operate the way we've
(12:18):
set it up on this board. It will operate at
this speed it's gonna and it's a safe speed. It's
not going to cause the processor, processor to overheat falls.
It falls within certain operating parameters that are considered to
be optimal for that system. So yeah, it's the rated speed. Yeah,
and just like CPUs, you can overclock GPUs aboutely want to.
In fact, there are a lot of video gamers out there,
(12:40):
that's what they do. Uh. So that's one thing that
determines how fast a video graphics card is able to
handle graphics. But that's not the only thing, because you
also have to worry about getting information to and from
that uh that that processor. So the size of the
memory bus is really important. The memory bus this is
(13:01):
kind of you can think of that is sort of
like the highway between the memory and the processor. And
you want a nice wide highway so that you can
shove as much data towards that processor as possible. Because
the processor, if it's really fast and is able to
handle a lot of instructions, that doesn't matter so much.
If it can't get the data it needs fast enough,
(13:22):
it may just be that, yeah, I'm super smart, but
you're giving me math problems at a rate that is,
you know, nowhere near my capacity, and so a lot
of this power is going to waste. So the memory
bus is a very important part of that equation, you know,
because you you you said the memory buses. It's like well,
(13:42):
and and that's the funny part about that is if
you're thinking about it in terms if that if you
made that visual connection to it's not um it really is.
The bus is the connection itself, not because I was
actually thinking of bus and what in the term given
in my in the right context, not in the vehicular
one I want. But also other things that that determine
(14:06):
the speed include the amount of available memory, so that
onboard memory that's on that graphics card plays a big part.
That's just that's just as true in your computer for
general computing purposes. You know, your computer needs a good
amount of memory, so the CPU does not have to
constantly look for the information within your systems hard drive.
That slows things down. So keeping more and more data
(14:29):
in memory means the CPU doesn't have to consult the
hard drive so much and things just move at a
faster clip. Very important when you're rendering graphics, because you know,
you want to be able to render graphics at a
really good speed. Humans like in general twenty five frames
per second. That's a good speed for us. It's hard
for us to detect uh problems at anything that's faster
(14:52):
than that. But for high you know, really action oriented
video games with lots of high speed stuff. Stick Steve
frames per second is generally considered, that's your goal. You
want to hit sixty frames per second because you're not
going to have too much blurring or artifacts or other
problems if you're able to display information at that speed
(15:14):
and uh and so that's really important as well. The
memory clock rate is also important. Memory bandwidth um and uh.
If you're using an ancient system, ramdack speed. So ramdack
that's uh. When when the process is handling this information,
(15:34):
it's all digital, right, it's all ones and zeros. Some
of us who have older computer systems may have display
that's not digital. We might have an analog display, which
means you have to convert those signals from digital to analog.
That's what the ram dex job is. But these days
most displays are digital. If you were to go out
(15:55):
and buy a system now, it would be it would
have a digital display. Analog just doesn't really that's not
a thing anymore. So it's really for people who have
older systems they would have to worry about the ram
dag issue. In fact, I'm sure that it's being phased
out of almost everything at this point because I mean,
you know, why would you be using this older monitor
when you could go out and get a new display.
(16:17):
Tune in this week is Captain Atomic takes on the
evil of ram Dak. Yeah, yeah, different different Ramdackum you
will phase him out. So and like you were saying that,
the job of this is to to to the the
job that we were intending graphics cards to do, I
(16:39):
should say, was to render graphics. And uh so like
the polygon issue, that's generally speaking, it tends to be
triangles a second, and uh and and these these little
bit tiny triangles are what make up the various surfaces
you see in represented in computer graphics. Yeah, we're talking
primarily three dimensional type stuff, three D graphics, so that
(17:02):
there's at least an illusion of depth. In fact, that's
really where the graphics cards came out of. You know. Um,
before that, you might have a GPU in a computer,
but it would be uh incorporated directly onto the motherboard.
It wasn't an additional card like you said. The Amiga
had them. The Amiga is one of the earliest systems
to have its own GPU. Before that, you could have
(17:25):
graphics that were vector based graphics, like you know, the
the video game Asteroids was vector based graphics. Yeah, these
are games vector vector versus raster we're talking about here, Yes,
I love those. We can stop giving examples, but I
guess it helps to explain what the differences between vector
(17:45):
graphics and raster graphics. Vector graphics graphics are mathematical there,
they're like line art exactly. It's it's geometrical shapes that
are based on mathematic uh, calculations. So these are lines
and curves points. They could be shapes like polygons and uh.
(18:06):
The nice thing about vector graphics is they are really scalable.
You can it's dependent upon what your machine can do,
not dependent upon the file. Uh. So in other words,
you can a vector graphic at a certain size is
going to look just as good or not as good
as it will be at a size many many manion
(18:28):
times larger than that. It all depends on the equipment,
not on the graphics file. Yeah. Now, now, raster graphic
or bitmapped graphics UM is made up of basically made
up of little dots and um. That's the way are
are our printers work, That's the way our displays works.
So this is raster graphics that's much more common. Yeah.
(18:52):
So well, if you talk about a good example, I
think for what you were mentioning was photos. Yeah, if
you've ever taking a photo, put on your computer and
decided you wanted to blow it up, you may notice
that it starts to look rather grainy, block and yeah
or blocky. You can see a little sharp angles where
(19:12):
the which or the outlines of the pixels really yeah,
and and then and what it's doing is the computer
is basically having to make up information in between the
little dots of information that came with the picture. So
you know, it's it's going, well, that's kind of green
and this kind of orange. All I'll split the difference
(19:35):
and uh and uh, you know, when you make something smaller,
it's easy because you're compressing the information. It can go,
oh well, I don't need these pixels, so I'll toss
them out and uh, you know things that you can
only shrink a photo without distorting it, but expanding it
as a different question and a graphics vector graphics aren't
like that because when you blow something up, it goes,
(19:57):
oh well, basically it's this point in that point, I'm
you do the math. It looks fine. So the games
and stuff that we play, those are raster graphics. That's
where we've got those those images that are made up
of pixels. So, um, you know, that's trying to create
a uh, a detailed graphic representation of a character, especially
(20:22):
character that's in motion and doing lots of stuff at
a at a good frame rate. That's that's a pretty
intensive process as far as processing power is concerned. Um.
And that's why we had companies start to develop graphics
cards to help take this load off the onboard graphics
chips that computers had because they just weren't up to
(20:43):
the task of processing that amount of information. Which meant
that if you went out and you had a regular PC,
will off the shelf PC, no additional graphics card other
than what the onboard graphics card was, uh, and you
come home, plug it in and you load up that
first person shooter game that's brand new, it would not
(21:04):
run very well. You would have to run it at
a very low detail quality, so that it's having to
do fewer polygons on the screen at a time because
it just didn't have the processing power to keep up.
Or you'd have to really and or you'd have to
really reduce the frame rate so that the actual experience
(21:24):
is not as smooth or pleasant. And you might think, wow,
this is a terrible game, but really it's because the
hardware you're running on isn't up to the task of
running the game at the the experience that the game
developers intended. So the graphics cards were what allowed you
to plug it in, usually in a well. Back in
(21:45):
the day, it was PC I or UM white a
g P. Yeah, those were the two card slots to
would plug them into. Today it's PC I Express almost
exclusively um where which has got a It's it's a
more efficient and faster way of transferring information from a
card to the motherboard and uh and out to a display.
(22:09):
So you would plug you would plug this in, and
it was designed to be pretty easy, I mean relatively speaking.
You're not soldering or anything, opening up a computer case,
sliding a card in an expansion slot, screwing it tight
so that it's not gonna wiggle in the case, close
it back up, plug in your your peripherals, and you're
(22:31):
good to go. It's a little more complicated now because
if you're getting a state of the art, fastest possible
processor you can get for a GP, especially you're getting
two of them, because there are a lot of motherboards
out there now that support dual graphics cards. Um, some
of these are so powerful that they require more power
(22:53):
than what the motherboard can supply. More power. Yeah, so
they have to plug into your computer's actual powers apply,
not the motherboard. And uh, particularly if they are so
powerful that they have their own onboard fans. The fan
used to help distribute the hot air so that the
processor does not overheat. Yeah, well that's that's one of
(23:16):
the problems that that prevent high end graphics cards from
being included with some laptops, which is simply because it's
easier to put in a high end graphics card that
requires its own fan in a tower case, really a
towered desktop computer case, because there's simply more room for it. Um.
(23:40):
Less room on a laptop in general, less ability to
find a way to disperse that extra heat. So not
only are you're you dealing with the main central processing
unit CPU, you're also dealing with the GPU. And you're going, wow,
this is going to burn someone's legs off when they
put it on their lap because I don't actually have
a good way to disperse a seat, or it's going
(24:00):
to cause the machine to shut down after twenty minutes
of working, which is probably not quite as bad as
burning somebody, but it's irritating, irritating, but not disfiguring. So
there's that you take that home. But but yeah, I
mean and and uh also easier to uh to get
into a desktop machine to swap a card or add
(24:22):
a card um, as you were pointing out, some you
know support multiple Um. Then it would be necessarily with
the laptop, especially something like an ultra book that is
put together just so so that it makes that nice
slim form factor that those are pretty much you're you're
out of luck there. Um. The yeah, it's uh, it's
(24:44):
the the graphics cards tend to be more of a
desktop type of component than laptop. And I mean, for
for the reasons you you pointed out, um, which is
also one of the reasons why uh, serious hardcore video
gamers on the PC tend to prefer desktop setups rather
(25:06):
than a laptop. Because even if you go out and
you buy a state of the art gaming laptop right
now for thousands of dollars, and it might it might
right now rival the best desktop computers out there. The
advantage of the desktop computers have is that, in general,
their machines are much more customizable and easily modified than laptops. There.
(25:29):
I'm sure there are exceptions out there, but that's the
general rule, and it's a pretty safe one because it's
just tends to be a lot easier to fiddle with
stuff that's inside a desktop case because you've got a
lot more space there than you do with a laptop.
There may be cards that a laptop just physically cannot
accommodate because there's just not the room. And if you've
(25:50):
seen some of these video cards, it's not hard to
imagine because some of them look like they are you know,
some of them look like they came straight out of
a video game, like this looks like it's a magazine
clip for a futuristic machine gun or something. Uh. Some
of them am like wow, I don't know that I
have a computer pretty enough to install this thing in.
(26:11):
And in fact, some of them, I would argue the
design here. They've created aesthetic for the video card, which
never used to be a concern. Right. These were cards
that just fit inside a computer case. You never saw
them unless you had to open the case. But now
we've got these cases that have exposed sides. So suddenly
the aesthetic design of the graphics card has become a
(26:33):
consideration well also, um, people who play a lot of
I would argue this is probably the case for uh,
hardcore serious gamers. Two, is it's nice that it looks
cool because you're buying this, you know, updated graphics card
that's going to be able to do all this extra
pixel rendering, and you know you want to look cool.
(26:54):
And some of these graphics cards cost as much or
more than video game consoles, which brings me back to
the whole thing about saying, you know, video cards are
what made me a console gamer. It's not quite as
simple as that, but it is very close in the
sense that I saw that, you know, because I was
(27:15):
there when the video game cards, the standalone graphics cards
started to become a thing, um, and I could see
that within six months to a year, the cards that
had been out on the market were no longer able
to run the most current games at their ideal settings.
And that was a pretty rough wake up call to
(27:37):
me saying that even if I had saved up the
money to buy a video card for my computer and
I had swapped it out, and I thought, wow, this
is an amazing experience. Six months to a year down
the road, I would feel like I'd have to do
that all over again just to keep up with the
video games that were coming out at that time. It's
(27:58):
a constant cycle, or can be a concert cycle of
needing more memory and a new processor and a new
graphics processor with more memory, and having to upgrade one
or the other or all of the above. Right you
you eventually get to a point, like we said, where
the motherboard can't support the latest graphics card. Then you're like,
all right, now I gotta get a new, entirely new system. Uh.
(28:19):
And so now, if I were the kind of person
who I was constantly building computers, that might not be
as big a deal because I could replace components as
I needed to. And one can argue that maybe through
the lifetime of a video game PC you spend less
money than you would with a console game, depending upon
how much gaming you do, because console games do tend
(28:40):
to be more expensive, and they do tend to be
more expensive for longer than PC games. PC games get
marked down, generally speaking, faster than console games do, so
there there is an argument to be made that you
could save money over the long term. If you are
an avid gamer, you buy a lot of games. Um,
(29:01):
if you go with a PC gaming rig, especially if
you decide to build one yourself, as opposed to buying
something that was customized off the shelf, like if you
actually go out and get the components. Um. It also
gives the developer a little bit of an added advantage too,
because if they're developing a title for say the PlayStation three,
they know exactly what kind of graphics card is in there,
(29:22):
so they can play to its strengths. Yeah. And actually
that was a real problem early on too, is that
you would get games that would be compatible with certain
graphics cards but not others. And then you know, you
might have a state of the art gaming computer back
in the mid nineties, and then find out that even
though you have a state of art gaming computer, you
(29:42):
still can't play certain games because they are not compatible
with the the hardware you have. Um. That's when you
shake your fist in the air and screen con Yeah.
We should also mention that effectively, the video card industry
is a duopoli. There are two companies that that's essentially
(30:04):
that's who you go to. Yeah, there's Nvidia and there's
a m D Yeah, also known as a t I.
Back in the day, but A m D purchased them,
acquired a t I. There are there are others until
makes some graphics cards, um, you know, and they're they're
really others. But yeah, when when we're talking about this, uh,
(30:25):
probably the listeners that wanted us to talk about this
would already know that those two are the big players
and they they're in a constant game of one upsmanship. Uh.
The fastest card I could find so far, at least
as far as clock speed goes, not performance. Actually, as
far as performance goes, is not the fastest. But with
clock speed, uh is uh without over clocking is uh?
(30:50):
The A m D Radio on h D seven seven
seven zero Giga Hurts edition, which it's one giga Hurts
GPU and um it again that's without overclocking. But uh,
that's not that fast. But yeah, when it when all
it's doing, when it's handling primarily graphics, having that dedicated
processing power behind it, you know that don't sneeze at
(31:13):
the one gigga hurt. Now again, through the testing, it
did not perform at the same level as some of
the top of the line, most expensive cards that are
out there. Uh. And part of that is just because
you know, the Again, it's it's more than just the
clock speed. We talked about that. So that's that's kind
(31:36):
of the roundup on graphics cards in general, Like we
had said, they're being used to process information beyond just
graphics because it's got this parallel process and capability, so
you can use it for things that require lots of
parallel computational problems, things that you know, there's a lot
of scientific and medical applications for that kind of technology,
(31:59):
but the one that we talked about most recently is
cryptography and cracking codes and using parallel processing to run
a brute force attack where you're just running lots and
lots of variations on various passwords to try and determine
what the hashing algorithm is for a for for a
(32:20):
password site. So the unless the operating system is specifically
assigning it tasks, you would have to have software that
specifically directs information to the graphics card. And um, the
people who yeah, there there are programs that specifically tell
the GPU to to go to work on these these problems.
(32:41):
So um, and then it's not specifically specific enough to
where the hardware is. It's like, well, it's not a
piece of graphics, so I can't do this. You know,
it's very capable of handling that. So alright, So I
think that wraps up this discussion on video cards. I
hope that that was That was satisfying to our listeners
who were asking us repeatedly to cover it. Actually, you know,
(33:07):
I sound like I'm I'm exhausted by it. I'm not.
I really I like seeing enthusiasm from our listeners. That's
very It's a good thing. So if you are enthusiastically
interested in a particular topic and we have not covered it,
or perhaps we covered it a long time ago and
it's darn near time that we recover it, let us know.
Send us a message. You can send us an email
(33:28):
our addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or let
us know on Facebook or Twitter. Our handle at both
of those is text stuff h sw and Chris and
I will talk to you again really soon for more
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(33:48):
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(00:45):
tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette
and I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
Sitting across from me, as is senior writer Jonathan he there,
and I want to warn you all today's episode maybe
(01:06):
graphic that's correct, it's about graphics cards. We have received
lots of questions and requests for us to do an
episode about graphics cards, some of which hounded us through
multiple forms of media. And so today you get your wish,
we're gonna talk about graphics cards. These are the things
(01:27):
that got me into console gaming, which is true. No, So, Chris,
you and I remember, I mean we were we were
both using computers during the nineties when there was the
kind of revolution in personal computers where and a a
an independent secondary graphics card became a necessity if you
(01:51):
wanted to stay up to date with the latest games
that were coming out. Yeah. I remember with my very
first Amiga how they would talk about there were their
secondary chips on the motherboard that we handle additional operations,
not just the one processor. And I think, um, it
probably seems silly to a lot of us now, like, oh, well,
(02:12):
of course you know that would be important. But you know,
as computing has gone on, we've realized some that although
you have you know, Moore's law, which basically just you know,
talks about computing power growing exponentially, and you say, well, okay,
you know you've got more and more powerful computers, but
we've realized over that time too that although you may
(02:34):
have more powerful processors, Dividing tasks up between multiple processors
is a better way to compute because you can accomplish
more when you divide these jobs, and uh, you know,
it's it's more efficient that way. It's it's very simple. Yeah,
So a graphics card job essentially is to really manipulate
(02:56):
computer memory at a very rapid rate so that information
coming in can be converted into graphic information that's going
to be displayed upon a monitor of some sort. And
it's almost its own computer. Yeah, it's it's it's its
own processor, certainly. And the idea is that this takes
(03:16):
some of that burden from the CPU and it shoulders
it itself so that the CPU can um sort of
become like a manager. The CPU sends the instructions to
the GPU, which then takes care of calculations and and
it's it's designed to do that in a very streamlined,
(03:36):
fast way. And part of that design is this idea
of parallelism, which is what Chris was talking about, where
you have your your chip created in such a way
to process sets of instructions in parallel with each other
because those different sets of instructions don't depend directly on
each other. You know, if you think about computer problem.
(04:00):
One type of computer problem could be an ongoing uh
calculation where the outcome of the previous calculation determines what
the next calculation will be. Right, So we'll just say
that for the first calculation, we're gonna do something really simple.
Just for example, say that the first calculation is two
plus two and the the output is four, and then
(04:24):
the four from that first calculation is used in the
second calculation. Where you have another variable, Well, we'll say
that for the purposes of this problem, that variable is
going to be eight, and whatever the product the whatever
the sum is from that first calculation gets added to eight.
So the the second calculation depends upon the outcome of
(04:45):
the first one. The two plus two is four. Well,
now I've got the the sum of that first calculation four.
I can now add that to eight to get twelve,
and so on and so forth. Well, with all those
calculations depending upon one another, having a single processor makes sense.
You can't really divide that up because you don't know
what the outcome is going to be of a previous calculation,
so you can't move forward until you get that. But
(05:08):
there are other computer problems which we have talked about
several times on this podcast that you can divide up
because they are not interdependent that way, and have a
processor or several processors work on that problem, on those problems,
and the outcome ends up creating whatever it is you
need and UM. In that case, the GPU design was
(05:32):
meant to do that. So we had parallel processors with
GPUs well before you started seeing multi cores in consumer computers. Yeah, yeah,
that's true. By the way, if you run across computers
that offer perpendicular processing, I don't recommend it they I
(05:52):
wasted a lot of money once anyway, being so obtuse UM. Actually,
when you look at the parts of a graphics card,
UM again, they seem rather you know common sense. You've
got a graphics card is its own motherboard, It has
a its own processor on it, UM, and its own memory. UM.
(06:15):
You may actually see, you know, specifications, I remember seeing
specifications for how much v RAM, video RAM or or
graphics memory. UM. That's all part of what you see
on the graphics card. And some graphics cards are you know, customizable.
You can you can add memory. UM depends on your
computer course, and and all of that also depends on
(06:36):
your your the type of graphics card you use depends
heavily upon the kind of motherboard your computer has. That's true.
That's true. Not all motherboards can support all graphics cards.
It depends on especially if you have an older computer.
There comes a point with older computers where the newest
video cards just the old motherboards can't support them. So
(07:01):
that's one thing to keep in mind that the motherboard
your your computer's motherboard has a you know, a shelf
life really and at some point it does become obsolete,
at least in comparison to the latest hardware that comes
or the latest components that are out on the market.
And basically, uh, well, I can't think of a computer
that doesn't have a video output of some kind on it,
(07:22):
even even laptops or ultra books, you know, things that
that are designed to have fewer ports than things because
it's streamlined. Even those machines generally have UM some kind
of video output. Of course, the main one on those
would be at their own screen, but um coming off
of the graphics card. You need to uh to be
(07:43):
able to display the results, so you know, they'll they'll
generally have some kind of connector UM and of course,
key to this all is your operating system, because your
operating system is uh, what is doing basically the traffic management.
So let's say, uh, probably the main reason we talk
(08:03):
about graphics cards these days are for you know, really
three things games, um, high resolution video editing or or
you know, graphics photo editing. You know, those are the
reasons we really talk about the graphics card. I mean,
if you say, yeah, I've got to surf the web
on my computer, you don't go, yeah, but what kind
(08:24):
of graphics card you got, man? I will add I
will add a fourth a fourth yeah, which has nothing
to do with graphics. Okay, it's what people have started
to use GPUs to do. I figured we'd talked about
that way, which goes back to the parallel processing. So
the fourth one, I would say, is parallel processing that
does not necessarily go back to video processing. So and
that can be for lots of different stuff. I know
(08:45):
specifically which one you're thinking about. But because we did
our our episode on on password security and talked about
how GPUs have been used to help crack passwords through
brute force attacks, but they can also be is to
do other parallel processing, not just you know, cryptography, No,
that that's true because UM, well, actually uh we had
(09:06):
talked about it on our our podcast about about the
mac os ten snow Leopard. One of the changes was
that they added the ability to uh um send instructions.
And that's really what I was sort of getting at
with the the operating system is, you know, it's let's
say you're playing a game and uh you know, you
have the game itself, the instructions that are going out
(09:28):
about where your character is and where it's moving across
the screen, and it's sending other instructions about how to
render that on the screen to the graphics processor card,
which takes care of computation for things like the number
of polygons that you see on the screen, how fast
those that information can be displayed. So they work in
(09:49):
concert through the help of the operating system to uh
manage the rest of the stuff and the graphics specific
stuff with the two different the two different cars, and
mac Os ten is able in the newer incarnations of
the operating system is able to uh um, and I
assume that's true for newer versions of Windows and Lenox
(10:10):
as well as you know, able to send instructions to
the graphics cards. So Let's say you are surfing the
web and maybe you have a music playing on you know,
music player service, and you've got email going on, and uh,
you know, five or ten other little things going on
in the background, your calendar software. UM, your graphics card
(10:31):
may not be working over time. So the processing uh,
you know, the the operating system goes, hey, since you're
not busy and you handle some of these other instructions,
kind of take a load off this couch. Yeah, exactly.
So it goes in and helps move the couch, um,
so to speak, and take some of the load off
(10:51):
the main processor, which which is ingenious that any operating
system would be able to do that. Um, And it
just so happens. I know about that one because we
were talking about it in that But you know, the
operating systems have become so much more sophisticated and to
be able to take advantage of that specifically, UM, to
take a load off of the main processors is excellent.
(11:13):
The things that determine how fast a graphics card is, uh,
it's more than just the GPU clock speed of the processors.
So keep in mind the heart of this graphics card
is a processor. We call the GPU. The graphics processing unit.
And and it's it's very similar to a CPU. I
(11:33):
mean that it's job is to crunch data. It's just
in this case most of the time that data has
to do with rendering graphics. UM, so the clock speed
is definitely important. And clock speed, of course, that's generally speaking,
the number of instructions a CPU can carry out within
a second. Uh, that's the number of cycles. Because keeping
(11:56):
in mind that when I say instruction, really instruct it's
really cycles, and some instructions require multiple cycles to complete.
I want to make sure I get that before people
are like, well, you know actually, and people are going
to mention the fact that processors can be overclocked or underclocked. Yeah,
that that speed is a rating that the manufacturer gives
it that basically says, this will operate the way we've
(12:18):
set it up on this board. It will operate at
this speed it's gonna and it's a safe speed. It's
not going to cause the processor, processor to overheat falls.
It falls within certain operating parameters that are considered to
be optimal for that system. So yeah, it's the rated speed. Yeah,
and just like CPUs, you can overclock GPUs aboutely want to.
In fact, there are a lot of video gamers out there,
(12:40):
that's what they do. Uh. So that's one thing that
determines how fast a video graphics card is able to
handle graphics. But that's not the only thing, because you
also have to worry about getting information to and from
that uh that that processor. So the size of the
memory bus is really important. The memory bus this is
(13:01):
kind of you can think of that is sort of
like the highway between the memory and the processor. And
you want a nice wide highway so that you can
shove as much data towards that processor as possible. Because
the processor, if it's really fast and is able to
handle a lot of instructions, that doesn't matter so much.
If it can't get the data it needs fast enough,
(13:22):
it may just be that, yeah, I'm super smart, but
you're giving me math problems at a rate that is,
you know, nowhere near my capacity, and so a lot
of this power is going to waste. So the memory
bus is a very important part of that equation, you know,
because you you you said the memory buses. It's like well,
(13:42):
and and that's the funny part about that is if
you're thinking about it in terms if that if you
made that visual connection to it's not um it really is.
The bus is the connection itself, not because I was
actually thinking of bus and what in the term given
in my in the right context, not in the vehicular
one I want. But also other things that that determine
(14:06):
the speed include the amount of available memory, so that
onboard memory that's on that graphics card plays a big part.
That's just that's just as true in your computer for
general computing purposes. You know, your computer needs a good
amount of memory, so the CPU does not have to
constantly look for the information within your systems hard drive.
That slows things down. So keeping more and more data
(14:29):
in memory means the CPU doesn't have to consult the
hard drive so much and things just move at a
faster clip. Very important when you're rendering graphics, because you know,
you want to be able to render graphics at a
really good speed. Humans like in general twenty five frames
per second. That's a good speed for us. It's hard
for us to detect uh problems at anything that's faster
(14:52):
than that. But for high you know, really action oriented
video games with lots of high speed stuff. Stick Steve
frames per second is generally considered, that's your goal. You
want to hit sixty frames per second because you're not
going to have too much blurring or artifacts or other
problems if you're able to display information at that speed
(15:14):
and uh and so that's really important as well. The
memory clock rate is also important. Memory bandwidth um and uh.
If you're using an ancient system, ramdack speed. So ramdack
that's uh. When when the process is handling this information,
(15:34):
it's all digital, right, it's all ones and zeros. Some
of us who have older computer systems may have display
that's not digital. We might have an analog display, which
means you have to convert those signals from digital to analog.
That's what the ram dex job is. But these days
most displays are digital. If you were to go out
(15:55):
and buy a system now, it would be it would
have a digital display. Analog just doesn't really that's not
a thing anymore. So it's really for people who have
older systems they would have to worry about the ram
dag issue. In fact, I'm sure that it's being phased
out of almost everything at this point because I mean,
you know, why would you be using this older monitor
when you could go out and get a new display.
(16:17):
Tune in this week is Captain Atomic takes on the
evil of ram Dak. Yeah, yeah, different different Ramdackum you
will phase him out. So and like you were saying that,
the job of this is to to to the the
job that we were intending graphics cards to do, I
(16:39):
should say, was to render graphics. And uh so like
the polygon issue, that's generally speaking, it tends to be
triangles a second, and uh and and these these little
bit tiny triangles are what make up the various surfaces
you see in represented in computer graphics. Yeah, we're talking
primarily three dimensional type stuff, three D graphics, so that
(17:02):
there's at least an illusion of depth. In fact, that's
really where the graphics cards came out of. You know. Um,
before that, you might have a GPU in a computer,
but it would be uh incorporated directly onto the motherboard.
It wasn't an additional card like you said. The Amiga
had them. The Amiga is one of the earliest systems
to have its own GPU. Before that, you could have
(17:25):
graphics that were vector based graphics, like you know, the
the video game Asteroids was vector based graphics. Yeah, these
are games vector vector versus raster we're talking about here, Yes,
I love those. We can stop giving examples, but I
guess it helps to explain what the differences between vector
(17:45):
graphics and raster graphics. Vector graphics graphics are mathematical there,
they're like line art exactly. It's it's geometrical shapes that
are based on mathematic uh, calculations. So these are lines
and curves points. They could be shapes like polygons and uh.
(18:06):
The nice thing about vector graphics is they are really scalable.
You can it's dependent upon what your machine can do,
not dependent upon the file. Uh. So in other words,
you can a vector graphic at a certain size is
going to look just as good or not as good
as it will be at a size many many manion
(18:28):
times larger than that. It all depends on the equipment,
not on the graphics file. Yeah. Now, now, raster graphic
or bitmapped graphics UM is made up of basically made
up of little dots and um. That's the way are
are our printers work, That's the way our displays works.
So this is raster graphics that's much more common. Yeah.
(18:52):
So well, if you talk about a good example, I
think for what you were mentioning was photos. Yeah, if
you've ever taking a photo, put on your computer and
decided you wanted to blow it up, you may notice
that it starts to look rather grainy, block and yeah
or blocky. You can see a little sharp angles where
(19:12):
the which or the outlines of the pixels really yeah,
and and then and what it's doing is the computer
is basically having to make up information in between the
little dots of information that came with the picture. So
you know, it's it's going, well, that's kind of green
and this kind of orange. All I'll split the difference
(19:35):
and uh and uh, you know, when you make something smaller,
it's easy because you're compressing the information. It can go,
oh well, I don't need these pixels, so I'll toss
them out and uh, you know things that you can
only shrink a photo without distorting it, but expanding it
as a different question and a graphics vector graphics aren't
like that because when you blow something up, it goes,
(19:57):
oh well, basically it's this point in that point, I'm
you do the math. It looks fine. So the games
and stuff that we play, those are raster graphics. That's
where we've got those those images that are made up
of pixels. So, um, you know, that's trying to create
a uh, a detailed graphic representation of a character, especially
(20:22):
character that's in motion and doing lots of stuff at
a at a good frame rate. That's that's a pretty
intensive process as far as processing power is concerned. Um.
And that's why we had companies start to develop graphics
cards to help take this load off the onboard graphics
chips that computers had because they just weren't up to
(20:43):
the task of processing that amount of information. Which meant
that if you went out and you had a regular PC,
will off the shelf PC, no additional graphics card other
than what the onboard graphics card was, uh, and you
come home, plug it in and you load up that
first person shooter game that's brand new, it would not
(21:04):
run very well. You would have to run it at
a very low detail quality, so that it's having to
do fewer polygons on the screen at a time because
it just didn't have the processing power to keep up.
Or you'd have to really and or you'd have to
really reduce the frame rate so that the actual experience
(21:24):
is not as smooth or pleasant. And you might think, wow,
this is a terrible game, but really it's because the
hardware you're running on isn't up to the task of
running the game at the the experience that the game
developers intended. So the graphics cards were what allowed you
to plug it in, usually in a well. Back in
(21:45):
the day, it was PC I or UM white a
g P. Yeah, those were the two card slots to
would plug them into. Today it's PC I Express almost
exclusively um where which has got a It's it's a
more efficient and faster way of transferring information from a
card to the motherboard and uh and out to a display.
(22:09):
So you would plug you would plug this in, and
it was designed to be pretty easy, I mean relatively speaking.
You're not soldering or anything, opening up a computer case,
sliding a card in an expansion slot, screwing it tight
so that it's not gonna wiggle in the case, close
it back up, plug in your your peripherals, and you're
(22:31):
good to go. It's a little more complicated now because
if you're getting a state of the art, fastest possible
processor you can get for a GP, especially you're getting
two of them, because there are a lot of motherboards
out there now that support dual graphics cards. Um, some
of these are so powerful that they require more power
(22:53):
than what the motherboard can supply. More power. Yeah, so
they have to plug into your computer's actual powers apply,
not the motherboard. And uh, particularly if they are so
powerful that they have their own onboard fans. The fan
used to help distribute the hot air so that the
processor does not overheat. Yeah, well that's that's one of
(23:16):
the problems that that prevent high end graphics cards from
being included with some laptops, which is simply because it's
easier to put in a high end graphics card that
requires its own fan in a tower case, really a
towered desktop computer case, because there's simply more room for it. Um.
(23:40):
Less room on a laptop in general, less ability to
find a way to disperse that extra heat. So not
only are you're you dealing with the main central processing
unit CPU, you're also dealing with the GPU. And you're going, wow,
this is going to burn someone's legs off when they
put it on their lap because I don't actually have
a good way to disperse a seat, or it's going
(24:00):
to cause the machine to shut down after twenty minutes
of working, which is probably not quite as bad as
burning somebody, but it's irritating, irritating, but not disfiguring. So
there's that you take that home. But but yeah, I
mean and and uh also easier to uh to get
into a desktop machine to swap a card or add
(24:22):
a card um, as you were pointing out, some you
know support multiple Um. Then it would be necessarily with
the laptop, especially something like an ultra book that is
put together just so so that it makes that nice
slim form factor that those are pretty much you're you're
out of luck there. Um. The yeah, it's uh, it's
(24:44):
the the graphics cards tend to be more of a
desktop type of component than laptop. And I mean, for
for the reasons you you pointed out, um, which is
also one of the reasons why uh, serious hardcore video
gamers on the PC tend to prefer desktop setups rather
(25:06):
than a laptop. Because even if you go out and
you buy a state of the art gaming laptop right
now for thousands of dollars, and it might it might
right now rival the best desktop computers out there. The
advantage of the desktop computers have is that, in general,
their machines are much more customizable and easily modified than laptops. There.
(25:29):
I'm sure there are exceptions out there, but that's the
general rule, and it's a pretty safe one because it's
just tends to be a lot easier to fiddle with
stuff that's inside a desktop case because you've got a
lot more space there than you do with a laptop.
There may be cards that a laptop just physically cannot
accommodate because there's just not the room. And if you've
(25:50):
seen some of these video cards, it's not hard to
imagine because some of them look like they are you know,
some of them look like they came straight out of
a video game, like this looks like it's a magazine
clip for a futuristic machine gun or something. Uh. Some
of them am like wow, I don't know that I
have a computer pretty enough to install this thing in.
(26:11):
And in fact, some of them, I would argue the
design here. They've created aesthetic for the video card, which
never used to be a concern. Right. These were cards
that just fit inside a computer case. You never saw
them unless you had to open the case. But now
we've got these cases that have exposed sides. So suddenly
the aesthetic design of the graphics card has become a
(26:33):
consideration well also, um, people who play a lot of
I would argue this is probably the case for uh,
hardcore serious gamers. Two, is it's nice that it looks
cool because you're buying this, you know, updated graphics card
that's going to be able to do all this extra
pixel rendering, and you know you want to look cool.
(26:54):
And some of these graphics cards cost as much or
more than video game consoles, which brings me back to
the whole thing about saying, you know, video cards are
what made me a console gamer. It's not quite as
simple as that, but it is very close in the
sense that I saw that, you know, because I was
(27:15):
there when the video game cards, the standalone graphics cards
started to become a thing, um, and I could see
that within six months to a year, the cards that
had been out on the market were no longer able
to run the most current games at their ideal settings.
And that was a pretty rough wake up call to
(27:37):
me saying that even if I had saved up the
money to buy a video card for my computer and
I had swapped it out, and I thought, wow, this
is an amazing experience. Six months to a year down
the road, I would feel like I'd have to do
that all over again just to keep up with the
video games that were coming out at that time. It's
(27:58):
a constant cycle, or can be a concert cycle of
needing more memory and a new processor and a new
graphics processor with more memory, and having to upgrade one
or the other or all of the above. Right you
you eventually get to a point, like we said, where
the motherboard can't support the latest graphics card. Then you're like,
all right, now I gotta get a new, entirely new system. Uh.
(28:19):
And so now, if I were the kind of person
who I was constantly building computers, that might not be
as big a deal because I could replace components as
I needed to. And one can argue that maybe through
the lifetime of a video game PC you spend less
money than you would with a console game, depending upon
how much gaming you do, because console games do tend
(28:40):
to be more expensive, and they do tend to be
more expensive for longer than PC games. PC games get
marked down, generally speaking, faster than console games do, so
there there is an argument to be made that you
could save money over the long term. If you are
an avid gamer, you buy a lot of games. Um,
(29:01):
if you go with a PC gaming rig, especially if
you decide to build one yourself, as opposed to buying
something that was customized off the shelf, like if you
actually go out and get the components. Um. It also
gives the developer a little bit of an added advantage too,
because if they're developing a title for say the PlayStation three,
they know exactly what kind of graphics card is in there,
(29:22):
so they can play to its strengths. Yeah. And actually
that was a real problem early on too, is that
you would get games that would be compatible with certain
graphics cards but not others. And then you know, you
might have a state of the art gaming computer back
in the mid nineties, and then find out that even
though you have a state of art gaming computer, you
(29:42):
still can't play certain games because they are not compatible
with the the hardware you have. Um. That's when you
shake your fist in the air and screen con Yeah.
We should also mention that effectively, the video card industry
is a duopoli. There are two companies that that's essentially
(30:04):
that's who you go to. Yeah, there's Nvidia and there's
a m D Yeah, also known as a t I.
Back in the day, but A m D purchased them,
acquired a t I. There are there are others until
makes some graphics cards, um, you know, and they're they're
really others. But yeah, when when we're talking about this, uh,
(30:25):
probably the listeners that wanted us to talk about this
would already know that those two are the big players
and they they're in a constant game of one upsmanship. Uh.
The fastest card I could find so far, at least
as far as clock speed goes, not performance. Actually, as
far as performance goes, is not the fastest. But with
clock speed, uh is uh without over clocking is uh?
(30:50):
The A m D Radio on h D seven seven
seven zero Giga Hurts edition, which it's one giga Hurts
GPU and um it again that's without overclocking. But uh,
that's not that fast. But yeah, when it when all
it's doing, when it's handling primarily graphics, having that dedicated
processing power behind it, you know that don't sneeze at
(31:13):
the one gigga hurt. Now again, through the testing, it
did not perform at the same level as some of
the top of the line, most expensive cards that are
out there. Uh. And part of that is just because
you know, the Again, it's it's more than just the
clock speed. We talked about that. So that's that's kind
(31:36):
of the roundup on graphics cards in general, Like we
had said, they're being used to process information beyond just
graphics because it's got this parallel process and capability, so
you can use it for things that require lots of
parallel computational problems, things that you know, there's a lot
of scientific and medical applications for that kind of technology,
(31:59):
but the one that we talked about most recently is
cryptography and cracking codes and using parallel processing to run
a brute force attack where you're just running lots and
lots of variations on various passwords to try and determine
what the hashing algorithm is for a for for a
(32:20):
password site. So the unless the operating system is specifically
assigning it tasks, you would have to have software that
specifically directs information to the graphics card. And um, the
people who yeah, there there are programs that specifically tell
the GPU to to go to work on these these problems.
(32:41):
So um, and then it's not specifically specific enough to
where the hardware is. It's like, well, it's not a
piece of graphics, so I can't do this. You know,
it's very capable of handling that. So alright, So I
think that wraps up this discussion on video cards. I
hope that that was That was satisfying to our listeners
who were asking us repeatedly to cover it. Actually, you know,
(33:07):
I sound like I'm I'm exhausted by it. I'm not.
I really I like seeing enthusiasm from our listeners. That's
very It's a good thing. So if you are enthusiastically
interested in a particular topic and we have not covered it,
or perhaps we covered it a long time ago and
it's darn near time that we recover it, let us know.
Send us a message. You can send us an email
(33:28):
our addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or let
us know on Facebook or Twitter. Our handle at both
of those is text stuff h sw and Chris and
I will talk to you again really soon for more
on this and thousands of other topics because it has
staff works dot com. See guys, I told you we
(33:48):
talked to you again really soon. That really soon is
right now. I'm just reminding you that we have our
photo upload widget live on the site at www dot
How stuff works dot com slash upgrade your tech Toyota
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(34:08):
those gadgets that you've created, all those hacks. If you're
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