GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation

Chapter 25. GPU Image Processing in Apple’s Motion

Pete WardenApple Computer

In this chapter I cover some of the challenges we faced, the solutions we found, and the lessons we learned while writing Motion. In here is everything we wish we had known when we started! The speed improvement over CPU-based rendering provided by pixel shaders was amazing, often ten to twenty times faster, but being on the frontier meant facing a steep hill to climb.

We needed to implement complex image-processing operations, so we needed GPUs that were able to run flexible and general-purpose pixel shaders. At the time we wrote Motion, in 2003 and early 2004, there were two families of graphics cards able to do this on the Mac: the ATI R3xx series and the NVIDIA NV34. ...