How GPUs Work

[Nytro]

How GPUs Work

David Luebke, NVIDIA Research

Greg Humphreys, University of Virginia

In the early 1990s, ubiquitous

interactive 3D graphics was still

the stuff of science fiction. By the

end of the decade, nearly every

new computer contained a graphics

processing unit (GPU) dedicated to

providing a high-performance, visually

rich, interactive 3D experience.

This dramatic shift was the inevitable

consequence of consumer

demand for videogames, advances in

manufacturing technology, and the

exploitation of the inherent parallelism

in the feed-forward graphics

pipeline. Today, the raw computational

power of a GPU dwarfs that of

the most powerful CPU, and the gap is

steadily widening.

Download: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/papers/pdfs/59_HowThingsWork.pdf