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Computer Hardware and Logic Circuits: Question 3

Syllabus 3.1

Structured AS 6 marks

A small games design studio is buying a new desktop computer that will be used mainly for sculpting and rendering detailed 3D game scenery.

(a) State one suitable input device for a designer to use when sculpting and positioning 3D objects on screen, and one suitable output device for viewing the finished 3D graphics in fine detail. [2]

(b) Two of the buses connecting the CPU to the rest of the computer are the address bus and the data bus. State what is transferred along each of these two buses. [2]

(c) Identify one hardware component, other than the CPU, RAM and the buses already mentioned, that is particularly important for this studio's use of the computer, and explain the role it plays. [2]

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Worked solution

Part (a): Choosing suitable input and output devices

The task is sculpting and positioning 3D objects, then judging fine graphical detail, so the chosen devices should match those specific needs rather than being generic choices.

Input device: a graphics tablet (used with a stylus) allows a designer to sculpt and position 3D objects with much finer, more natural hand control than a mouse.

Output device: a high-resolution monitor is needed so the designer can accurately judge fine detail, such as texture quality and lighting, in the rendered 3D graphics.

Part (b): The address bus and the data bus

The CPU uses several buses to communicate with memory. Two of them are:

  • Address bus: carries the memory address, the specific location in memory, that the CPU wants to read from or write to. It only needs to travel in one direction, from the CPU to memory, so it is unidirectional.
  • Data bus: carries the actual item of data being transferred. Data can flow from memory to the CPU (a read) or from the CPU to memory (a write), so the data bus is bidirectional.

Part (c): A further important hardware component

For a computer used mainly for building and rendering detailed 3D scenery, the GPU (graphics processing unit) is especially important. Rendering 3D graphics requires an enormous number of similar calculations to be performed at once, for example, working out the colour, texture and lighting of every pixel on the screen. A GPU is built with many processing cores designed specifically to carry out this kind of repetitive calculation in parallel, so it renders graphics far faster than the CPU could on its own. This frees the CPU to handle other tasks, such as running the rest of the design software.

Final answers

  • (a) Input: graphics tablet (with stylus). Output: high-resolution monitor.
  • (b) Address bus: carries the memory address being accessed. Data bus: carries the actual data being transferred.
  • (c) GPU, a specialised processor that carries out the large number of graphics calculations needed to render 3D scenery, speeding up rendering and freeing up the CPU.