GPGPU Programming for Games and Science

Chapter 4

GPU Computing

4.1 Drawing a 3D Object

The classical use of shader programming on GPUs involves drawing 3D

geometric primitives within a 2D window using perspective projection. In

order to motivate the parallelism that a GPU provides, let us review all the

steps involved in drawing a 3D geometric object. The parallelism comes in two

forms. The first form is the partitioning of the work due to the large number of

pixels that can be processed independently—this is massive parallelism due to

a large number of cores on the GPU. The second form is the vectorized work

per vertex and per pixel—this is SIMD parallelism available on each core. A

detailed ...