5

When the display hardware is physically rotated 90 degrees, your graphics can still be rendered with the correct side up. Where is this rotation accomplished? I can imagine a few possibilities:

A) The code for every low-level graphics primitive contains something to converts its arguments, like

if (portrait) {
   swap(x,y);
}

(or perhaps multiplying every coordinate with a matrix)

B) The part of the graphics card that continuously scans its memory to create a video signal reads the data in a different order.

C) The monitor paints the received data column by column instead of row by row

A and B sounds like they would be inefficient and C means that it would only work on monitors that has special hardware-support for rotation. Which one is it?

Joakim Rosqvist
  • 153
  • 2

1 Answers1

2

On typical GPUs today it's option B: monitor rotation is done by the video output hardware ("display engine") during scan-out. In addition to rotating/flipping, the display engine can also scale the image within certain limits, do simple color/gamma correction, and even composite multiple image layers ("planes") together, all dynamically during scan-out.

Nathan Reed
  • 25,002
  • 2
  • 68
  • 107