Interactive Graphics Display Works

How the Interactive Graphics Display Works

The modern graphic display is very simple in construction. It consists of the three components shown in figure 1.2 below.

(1) Frame Buffer

(2) Monitor like a TV set without the tuning and receiving electronics.

(3) Display Controller It passes the contents of the frame buffer to the monitor.

Inside the frame buffer the image is stored as a pattern of binary digital numbers, which represent a array of picture elements, or pixels. In the simplest case, where you want to store only black and white images, you can represent black pixels by “1’s” and white pixels by “0’s” in the frame buffer. Therefore, a array of black and white pixels of 16X16 could be represented by 32 bytes, stored in frame buffer.

The display controller reads each successive byte of data from the frame buffer and converts its 0’s and 1’s into corresponding video signals. This signal is then fed to the monitor, producing a black and white image on the screen. The display controller repeats this operation 30 times a second to maintain a steady picture on the monitor. If you want to change the image, then you need to modify the frame buffer’s contexts to represent the new pattern of pixels.