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A video display controller or VDC is an integrated circuit which is the main component in a video signal generator, a device responsible for the production of a TV video signal in a computing or game system. Some VDCs also generate an audio signal, but that is not their main function. VDCs were used in the home computers of the 1980s and also in some early video game systems. The VDC is the main component of the video signal generator logic, responsible for generating the timing of video signals such as the horizontal and vertical synchronisation signals and the blanking interval signal. Sometimes other supporting chips were necessary to build a complete system, such as RAM to hold pixel data, ROM to hold character fonts, or some discrete logic such as shift registers. Most often the VDC chip is completely integrated in the logic of the main computer system, (its video RAM appears in the memory map of the main CPU), but sometimes it functions as a coprocessor that can manipulate the video RAM contents independently ==Video display controllers vs. video display processors and graphics processing units== The difference between a VDC and the more modern video display processor (VDP) is not that the VDCs could not generate graphics, but they did not have the special hardware accelerators to create 2D and 3D images, while a typical 1990s VDP does have at least some form of hardware graphics acceleration. Also VDCs often had special hardware for the creation of "sprites", a function that in more modern VDP chips is done with the "Bit Blitter" using the "Bit blit" function. One example of a typical video display processor is the "VDP2 32-bit background and scroll plane video display processor" of the Sega Saturn. Another example is the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) chip that was used for the improved graphics of the later generation Amiga computers. This said, it is not completely clear when a "video chip" is a "video display controller" and when it is a "video display processor". For example, the TMS9918 is sometimes called a "video display controller" and sometimes a "video display processor". In general however a "video display processor" has some power to "process" the contents of the video RAM (filling an area of RAM for example), while a "video display controller" only controls the timing of the video synchronisation signals and the access to the video RAM. The graphics processing unit (GPU) goes one step further than the VDP and normally also supports 3D functionality. It is the chip that is now used in modern personal computers. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Video display controller」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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