Intel Blurs GPU, Preparing for a Vista Vs. Video Card Duel - How Intel Will Blur Your Screen
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Intel is keeping their options open in the patent, but they go to the trouble of providing the following image as a potential hardware configuration.
Keep in mind the whole project sounds very vague, but they did go to the trouble of providing this diagram. Their idea is to nest the new piece of hardware, the display processor, inside the system’s memory controller. The display processor will manage display information to prevent excessive frames from eating up memory bandwidth. The memory controller can then push video output to the display through the new chip. There isn’t much more detail than this on the hardware structure.
There is, however, plenty of information on the concepts of the display processor. This new processor will not blur your screen continuously. That could make typing and web browsing more irritating. Instead, the display processor activated when the memory bandwidth is overloaded. When the load is gone, the motion blur is removed again.
The developers are not expecting to blur very much video, so these periods of load are predicted to be short. The patent says, “In a typical implementation, animated user effects are of short duration, typically 0.25 to 0.5 seconds.” It also discusses one example to implement to blur, which is expanding a program (which was minimized to a desktop icon) to full size. The outer edges and contents of the icon have to expand smoothly until they reach full size. Right now, it’s clear that Intel has only the OS in mind when designing this technology, not gaming or serious video work. This is just a tool to make budget card useful.
The display processor will first run a low level blur on each frame to make the edges a bit less defined. After that, it starts to perform temporal and special averaging on the frames. It picks frames that are spaced apart, shown in the following illustration from the patent, and blends the intermediate frames into them.
The animation will use fewer frames per second, increasing the time between frames without losing the movement from the missing frames. The patent speculates:
Motion blur is utilized to preserve the perception of motion during these 3D animations giving them a pleasing appearance at low composition rates, which results in the sought after saving in graphics memory bandwidth.
Intel also has some ideas for predicatively caching likely animations at different resolutions. The motion blurred sequences could look a little bit fuzzier than if the display was running at a higher framerate, but those who use budget PCs and inexpensive portables probably won’t mind. Developing systems with an extra component will probably be less expensive (or so speculates Intel) than using more expensive video components.
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