1. Graphics Processing Unit
GPU
Graphics Processing Unit

2. Scene Transformations
Graphics Pipeline
Scene Transformations
Lighting & Shading
Viewing
Transformations
Rasterization

3. 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.
CPU
Frame
buffer
Display

4. GPU fixed function graphics pipeline
Geometry data
Transform & lighting
Culling, perspective divide, viewport mapping
Rasterization
Texturing
Alpha test, depth test, stencil test
Frame buffer blending
GPU fixed function graphics pipeline

5. Fixed function pipeline
Pipeline fixed in hardware
Each stage does fixed task
Tasks are parameterized
Inflexible

6. Programmable Pipeline
GPU is programmable
Shader programs
Vertex shaders & Fragment (or pixel) shaders

7. Programmable GPU graphics pipeline
Geometry data
Vertex Shader
Culling, perspective divide, viewport mapping
Rasterization
Fragment Shader
Alpha test, depth test, stencil test
Frame buffer blending

8. Shader Language
Low level (like assembler) but high-level language compilers
4 component floating point data type
SIMD
Direct3D: Microsoft
NV_Vertex_Program: OpenGL extension

9. Programmable Pipeline
60 frames per second
hardware pipeline of specialized stage
general-purpose parallel computational engine

10. Power
GPUs have moved away from the traditional fixed-function 3D graphics pipeline toward a flexible general-purpose 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 fixed-function 3D graphics pipeline toward a flexible general-purpose computational engine

11. Pipeline input Graphics systems: convert to triangles
Pass vertices to GPU processor
GPU: assemble into triangles

12. Rasterization

13. Model transformations

14. Lighting

15. Camera simulation

16. Texturing

17. hidden surfaces

18. Graphics pipeline evolved

19. Pipeline evolved

20. Evolved pipeline

21. Unified Shaders

22. GPGPU
Single GeForce 8800 chip achieves a sustained 330 billion floating- point operations per second (Gflops) on simple benchmarks