【TFT Color Display Special Report series 3 of 7】 Why do GUIs need hardware accelerators?
The user’s GUI sensitivity is the score for GUI products
Affective ties are very important to humans, as witnessed by their influence on product acceptance. A product that can influence the user’s feelings has higher product acceptance. A display’s output effect will directly influence the user’s feelings. When a display allows users to see its quality and impresses the user with its graphics output effect, rendering power, and smoothness at the first sight, this is a successful display product.
How to catch the user’s attention with the graphics display of GUI products?
How to make a display product catch the user’s attention? In my opinion, besides the graphic design effect, the overall color and smoothness presented by the graphics displayed on the screen will affect the value of a display product. What concerns users most? The experience from what they see, hear, and touch concerns users most. The smartphone is very popular nowadays. When using a smartphone, we will easily notice the clarity, smoothness, and color sharpness of its graphics display and ignore smartphones with lower quality in these areas. What designs can enhance the output effect of the graphics display? These accelerators can enrich the effect of graphics display and enhance the smoothness of control to add value to the product.
How do 2D graphics accelerators add value to GUI experience?
The 2D graphics accelerator is commonly used on the graphics display. As it can accelerate the display of graphics in different effects without CPU processing, its common functions are as follows:
- Rotation
Most LCMs display graphics horizontally because they are cheaper than those displaying graphics vertically. In this case, the hardware-accelerated rotation function will be very useful to directly display a graphics design in the same direction in consistency with the display through hardware rotation without the intervention of the CPU or software to enhance display smoothness.
- Copy and Move
When it is necessary to copy graphics to another place like paving a tile, the hardware-accelerated copy and move functions can help to achieve these tasks more efficiently.
- Layer Processing
When it needs to process two layers of graphics, like superimposition or removing border colors, we need to achieve the task with software bit by bit in the absence of hardware acceleration. On chips with relatively limited CPU efficiency, these processes requiring huge data processing will significantly affect the overall performance.
- Zoom-in and Zoom-out
To embedded processors with limited memory, the memory occupied by each image is extremely valuable. In the absence of a hardware accelerator for zooming in and out images, it needs to store many images in the memory, and memory use will escalate. A hardware accelerator can significantly reduce memory use for these tasks.
- Decompression of Images and Videos
The hardware accelerator for decompression functions similarly to that of the zoom-in and zoom-out accelerator. Both can significantly reduce memory use and refresh the screen at a rate faster than the persistence of vision to deliver a better viewing experience.
Enhancing product performance and adding value to products using Nuvoton platforms with hardware accelerators
Nuvoton equips the N9H20 / N9H26 / N9H30 color display controllers with all hardware accelerators mentioned above for users to enjoy the experience of accelerated graphics processing and quickly build beautiful GUIs to add value to products. Nuvoton will continue to provide more product information for users to create more value.