Task 2 – Understand Hardware Technologies for Game Platforms

Human-Computer Interfaces

Human-computer interface is the study of the interaction between people/users and computers. Companies design the layout of the buttons based on their target audience and this in turn helps the users interact with the computer or video game consoles. Ergonomics is the study of designing devices or equipment that fits the human body. There are many different types of human-computer interfaces, a mouse, a keyboard and a controller are all interface devices.

Before these devices are made, companies look at how the user would interact with the device. On a controller the buttons are placed where the users thumbs are able to reach them without much difficulty and so they feel comfortable. All interface devices for video game consoles are ergonomically designed, this means that they are designed with the human user in mind, the designers look at the shape of the users hands and the way they hold something, they also look at where the best place would be to put the buttons on the controller so it is easily reachable for your thumbs and still feel comfortable. Interface devices impact on gaming in many different ways, the controllers are designed to make a big impact in gaming because if more buttons are placed on the controller and it still feels comfortable then that will help make games have more functions and faster gameplay.

Central Processing Unit (CPU)

The Central Processing Unit (CPU) of a computer is a piece of hardware that carries out the instructions of a computer program. It performs basic arithmetical, logical and input/output operations of a computer system. The CPU is basically like the brains of the computer and every instruction, doesn’t matter how simple has to go through the CPU.

The Xbox 360 uses a triple-core IBM designed Xenon as it’s CPU and each core is capable of simultaneously processing two threads, which means it can therefore operate on up to six threads at once. Each core runs at 3.2 GHz.

The PlayStation 3 uses a cell processor which is developed by Toshiba and IBM specifically for the game system. The concept behind this processor was to create a chip that acted like a biological cell in an organism. Cell processors can cooperate with each other.

A CPU cache is a cache that is used by the CPU of a computer to reduce the average time to access memory. It is a smaller and faster memory which is able to store copies of the data from the most frequently used main memory locations.

Graphics Processor

The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a single-chip processor, just like the CPU. The different being that the GPU is used primarily for computing 3D fucntions, this includes things such as lighting effects, object transformations, and 3D motion. These type of calculations can be very taxing on the CPU, so the GPU helps to make the computer run more efficiently.

The Graphics Processor is designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display.  The GPU/graphics processor uses the cache to store textures.

As the years have gone on, video games have progressed and so have the graphics, they’ve become a lot more realistic looking and have a lot of detail in them. This in turn has meant that the GPU has had to develop in order to meet the demand of  the game, the speed and memory of the GPU has had to be increased so that the computer or games console doesn’t encounter such problems as low frame rate or graphical errors. Games have included more pixels, polygons (compose images that look 3D) and advanced nurbs (non-uniform rational basis spline – used to generate curves and surfaces) in order to create realistic 3D graphics. With this in mind, the speed of the GPU has to be able to render these aspects, work out control points of the nurbs and render the pixels and polygons on the screen as quickly as possible , which will ensure that the gameplay is fluent and has no frame rate problems. The amount of RAM is important for a GPU as well because the processes that the GPU is trying to do will be slowed as there won’t be enough space for it to temporarily hold that process as it tries to deal with other processes.

Memory

The purpose of having memory is that it is able to store data into your computer for future use and or just for safekeeping. Hard-drives are able to store large amounts of data for an extended amount of time. RAM (Random Access Memory) is the memory in a computer which is used to store running programs and the data for the programs, the data in the RAM can read and written quickly and in any order. The more memory you have in your computer/console then the more things they will be able to do at a higher quality.

Display

LCD (liquid crystal display) is a thin and flat panel display that uses the light modulating properties of liquid crystals, they don’t emit light directly. They display words and images, and are used in things like watches, digital clocks, calculators, telephones and are most commonly used in gaming devices.

Sound

A sound card is an internal computer expansion card that facilitates the input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. Monophonic sound is the most basic format of sound output and uses one channel of audio for it’s sound output, in monophonic sound systems they usually just use one speaker and the signal sent to the system encodes one single stream of sound. Stereophonic sound is recorded on two separate sources and are then divided across two channels.

Game Storage Medium

Game storage medium is any technology that is used to place, keep and retrieve data. Proprietary storage can only be used for one specific thing for PlayStation memory cards can only be used on the PlayStation. Standard storage can be used on anything and can store different types of data and still read it in it’s original form, for example an SD card can be used in cameras and also the Nintendo 3DS. Since game storage medium has been introduced to gaming, it has encouraged more people to go out and buy consoles, as before you couldn’t save your game and has to start from the beginning of the game every time you wanted to play it.

Connectivity

Connectivity is very important in today’s generation of gaming. Consoles have enabled more controllers to be connected to it so that the more people can use the console, the Xbox 360 allows 4 controllers to be connected to it at once and the PlayStation 3 is able to have 7 controllers connected to it. Wireless features have also been included on consoles, like local area network (LAN) which can connect people that are under one network and wide area network which enable people to connect to eachother from around the world.