GPU
Graphics Processing Unit
Scene Transformations Lighting & Shading
Graphics Pipeline
Viewing Transformations
GPUs evolved as hardware and software algorithms evolve
Rasterization
Early Graphics
Originally, no specialized graphics hardware All processing in software on CPU, Results transmitted to frame buffer
first, external frame buffers
later, internal frame buffers.
Frame buffer
CPU
Display
More detailed pipeline
Geometry data
Transform & lighting Culling, perspective divide, viewport mapping
Simple functionality transferred to specialized hardware.
Rasterization Simple texturing Depth test Frame buffer blending
Geometry data
Add more functionality to GPU.
Transform & lighting Culling, perspective divide, viewport mapping
Rasterization Simple texturing Depth test Frame buffer blending
Simple functionality transferred to specialized hardware
Fixed function GPU pipeline
Pipeline implemented in hardware Each stage does fixed task Tasks are parameterized Inflexible fixed, parameterized functions Vector-matrix operations (some parallelism).
Scene Transformations
GPU
Viewing
Transformations
CPU
Lighting & Shading
Frame buffer
Display
Rasterization
Technology advances
Hardware gets cheaper, smaller, and
more powerful
Parallel architectures develop Graphics processing get more
sophisticated (environmental mapping, displacement mapping, sub-surface scattering)
Need more flexibility in GPUs.
Make this programmable: Vertex Shader
Geometry data Transform & lighting Culling, perspective divide, viewport mapping Rasterization
Make this programmable: Fragment Shader
Complex texturing Depth test, alpha test, stencil test Frame buffer blending
Vertex shader
Graphics systems: convert everything to
triangles
Pass vertices, normals, colors, texture
coordinates to GPU processor
GPU: vertex-based computations,
Independent of other vertices
Later, assemble into triangles.
Fragment shader
Fragment is triangle clipped to pixel
Interpolate values
Multiple textures, Alpha, stencil, depth
Independent of other fragments
Blend with contents of frame buffer.
Geometry data
Vertex Shader Vertex Shader Vertex Shader
Introduce parallelism: add multiple units
Culling, perspective divide, viewport mapping Rasterization
Fragment Shader Fragment Shader Fragment Shader
Alpha test, depth test, stencil test
Frame buffer blending
Shading language
Shade trees -> Pixars Renderman shader
Shader Language
Low level (like assembler) but high-level
language compilers: nVidias Cg
4 component floating point data type SIMD
Cg: C-based graphics program
Array & structures Flow control Vectors & matrices No memory allocation, file I/O
Power
GPUs have moved away from the traditional fixedfunction 3D graphics pipeline toward a flexible generalpurpose computational engine.
The raw computational power of a GPU dwarfs that of
the most powerful CPU, and the gap is steadily widening.
GPUs have moved away from the traditional fixedfunction 3D graphics pipeline toward a flexible generalpurpose computational engine
Next: unify shaders
One set of shaders Allocate to either vertices or fragments
Pipeline evolved
Evolved pipeline
GPGPU
Make GPU more general adapt certain types of
programs to its pipelined, parallel architecture
Single GeForce 8800 chip achieves a sustained 330
billion floating-point operations per second (Gflops) on simple benchmarks
Cost-effective: graphics driving demand up, supply up,
price down for GPUs
Finding uses in non-graphics applications.
GeForce 8800 GTX
More general: NVIDIAs CUDA
More general data parallel model Decompose across threads Sharing and communication between threads..
