Current gpu capabilities

Modern GPUs use most of their transistors to do calculations related to 3D computer graphics. They began by accelerating the memory intensive work of texture mapping and rendering polygons, and later added units to accelerate geometry calculations such as mapping vertex into different coordinate systems. Recent developments in GPUs include support for programmable shaders which can manipulate vertices and textures with many of the same operations supported by CPUs, oversampling techniques to reduce aliasing, and very high-precision color formats. Because most of these computations involve matrix and vector operations, engineers and scientists have increasingly studied using GPUs for non-graphical calculations.

In addition to the 3D hardware, today's GPUs include basic 2D acceleration and frame buffer capabilities (usually with a VGA compatibility mode). In addition, most GPUs made since 1995 support the YUV color space and hardware overlays (important for digital video playback), and many GPUs made since 2000 support MPEG primitives like motion compensation and iDCT.

The typical modern stand-alone GPU sits on a separate graphics card from the motherboard, connected to the CPU and main RAM through the AGP or PCI Express bus. It has access to RAM on the card which is usually faster but lower-capacity than the main RAM. On the other hand, many motherboards have a GPU integrated into the Northbridge that uses the main memory as a frame buffer. This will usually be a cheaper solution than an independent GPU but will have dramatically lower performance. Integrated motherboards may or may not have an AGP slot for a stand-alone graphics card.

Gpu manufacturers

ATI Technologies, NVIDIA Corporation, 3Dlabs, Matrox, XGI Technology Inc., Intel, 3dfx. Microsoft Word From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Microsoft Word is a word processor program from Microsoft. It was originally written by Richard Brodie for IBM PC computers running DOS in 1983. Later versions were created for the Apple Macintosh (1984), SCO UNIX, and Microsoft Windows (1989). It became part of the Microsoft Office suite.

Microsoft Word 2003 features a number of improvements over earlier Word packages.

Microsoft Word v.X for Macintosh

The Beginning

Microsoft Word owes a lot to Bravo, the original GUI word processor developed at Xerox PARC. Bravo's creator Charles Simonyi left PARC to work for Microsoft in 1981. Simonyi hired Brodie, who had worked with him on Bravo, away from PARC that summer.

Word's first general release was for MS-DOS computers in late 1983. It was not well received, and sales lagged behind those of rival products such as WordPerfect.

On the Macintosh, however, Word gained wide acceptance after it was released in 1985, and especially with the second major release, Word 3.01 for Macintosh, two years later (Word 3.00 was plagued with bugs and quickly superseded). Like other Mac software, Word for Mac was a true what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor.

Although MS-DOS was a character-based system, Word for DOS was the first word processor for the IBM PC that showed typeface markups such as bold and italics directly on the screen while editing, although this was not a true WYSIWYG system. Other DOS word processors, such as WordStar and WordPerfect, used simple text-only display with markup codes on the screen or sometimes, at the most, alternative colors.

However, as with most DOS software, each program had its own, often complicated, set of commands for performing functions that had to be learned (for example, in Word for DOS, a file would be saved with the sequence Escape-T-S), and as most secretaries had learned how to use WordPerfect, companies were reluctant to switch to a rival product that offered few advantages.