August 2007
Intermediate to advanced
1008 pages
21h 13m
English
Takeshi Yamanouchi SEGA Corporation
In this chapter, we take up integer stream processing on the GPU, which has been at best a difficult task to do on the GPU up to now.
Traditionally the GPU has been used almost exclusively for floating-point operations, because integer operations could only be done using the mantissa of floats; thus, processes that required bitwise logical operations were impossible. Another issue was that we had to render the output of the GPU to textures or pixel buffers before we could get to our results. Therefore, to process streaming data, we needed to write tricky graphics code.
However, with the advent of the new GeForce 8 Series GPU, several new extensions and functions ...