Winn L. Rosch Hardware Bible, Sixth Edition

Video Technology

As far as most of your computer is concerned, its job is done when it writes an image to the frame buffer. After all, once you've got all the pixels arranged the way you want them in memory, shipping them off through a cable to your display should be a simple matter. It isn't. The image must be transformed from its comparatively static position in screen memory to a signal that can traverse a reasonable interface—after all, the cable alone for a parallel interface capable of moving data for nearly a million pixels would likely be thicker than the average computer. Consequently, the frame-buffer image must be converted into a stream of serial data for transmission.

The need for this kind of image transformation became evident ...