C++ High Performance

GPU APIs and parallel operations

The main API for programming the GPU is OpenGL, although similar functionality is available in DirectX as well.

Here are some examples of simple, independent operations that could be executed on the GPU at an early stage:

• Transform a point from world coordinates to screen coordinates.
• Perform a lighting calculation at a specific point (by lighting calculation I refer to calculating the color of a specific pixel in an image).

As these operations could be performed in parallel, the GPUs were designed for executing small operations in parallel.

Technically, a CPU commonly consists of a few general-purpose cached cores, whereas a GPU consists of a huge number of highly specialized cores. This means that the ...