PCX

PCX, standing for PiCture eXchange, is an image file format developed by the now-defunct ZSoft Corporation of Marietta, Georgia. It was the native file format for PC Paintbrush and became one of the first widely accepted DOS imaging standards, although it has since been succeeded by more sophisticated image formats, such as BMP, JPEG, and PNG. PCX files commonly stored palette-indexed images ranging from 2 or 4 colors to 16 and 256 colors, although the format has been extended to record true-color (24-bit) images as well.

PCX image formats

PCX was designed during the early development of PC display hardware and most of the formats it supported are no longer used, Table A shows a list of the most commonly used PCX formats. Contemporary image editing programs may not read PCX files that match older hardware.

PCX is supported by common image processing software including ACDSee, GIMP, ImageMagick, IrfanView, LView, Netpbm, PaintShop Pro, Photoshop, Visio, PMview, and XnView. In version 2.1.4 FFmpeg could encode and decode the PCX pixel formats rgb24, rgb8, bgr8, rgb4_byte, bgr4_byte, gray, pal8, and monob.

GeForce 4 series

The GeForce4 (codenames below) refers to the fourth generation of GeForce-branded graphics processing units (GPU) manufactured by Nvidia. There are two different GeForce4 families, the high-performance Ti family, and the budget MX family. The MX family spawned a mostly identical GeForce4 Go (NV17M) family for the laptop market. All three families were announced in early 2002; members within each family were differentiated by core and memory clock speeds. In late 2002, there was an attempt to form a fourth family, also for the laptop market, the only member of it being the GeForce4 4200 Go (NV28M) which was derived from the Ti line.

GeForce4 Ti

Architecture

The GeForce4 Ti (NV25) was launched in April 2002 and was a revision of the GeForce 3 (NV20). It was very similar to its predecessor; the main differences were higher core and memory clock rates, a revised memory controller (known as Lightspeed Memory Architecture II), updated pixel shaders, an additional vertex shader (the vertex and pixel shaders were now known as nFinite FX Engine II), hardware anti-aliasing (Accuview AA), and DVD playback. Proper dual-monitor support was also brought over from the GeForce 2 MX. The GeForce 4 Ti was superior to the GeForce 4 MX in virtually every aspect save for production cost, although the MX had the Nvidia VPE (video processing engine) which the Ti lacked.

GeForce FX series

The GeForce FX or "GeForce 5" series (codenamed NV30) is a line of graphics processing units from the manufacturer NVIDIA.

Overview

NVIDIA's GeForce FX series is the fifth generation of the GeForce line. With GeForce 3, NVIDIA introduced programmable shader functionality into their 3D architecture, in line with the release of Microsoft's DirectX 8.0. The GeForce 4 Ti was an enhancement of the GeForce 3 technology. With real-time 3D graphics technology continually advancing, the release of DirectX 9.0 brought further refinement of programmable pipeline technology with the arrival of Shader Model 2.0. The GeForce FX series is NVIDIA's first generation Direct3D 9-compliant hardware.

The series was manufactured on TSMC's 130 nm fabrication process. It is compliant with Shader Model 2.0/2.0A, allowing more flexibility in complex shader/fragment programs and much higher arithmetic precision. It supports a number of new memory technologies, including DDR2, GDDR2 and GDDR3 and saw NVIDIA's first implementation of a memory data bus wider than 128 bits. The anisotropic filtering implementation has potentially higher quality than previous NVIDIA designs. Anti-aliasing methods have been enhanced and additional modes are available compared to GeForce 4. Memory bandwidth and fill-rate optimization mechanisms have been improved. Some members of the series offer double fill-rate in z-buffer/stencil-only passes.