Hands-On GPU Computing with Python

Fifth generation

According to Moore's law, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. But from 2003 through 2004, the rate of GPU hardware technology was accelerating at a rate much faster than Moore's law. NVIDIA GeForce 6 and ATI Radeon X800 were some of the first cards to use the PCI-express bus in 2004. Early high-level GPU languages such as Brook and Sh had been developed for GPU programming. They offered greater control through true conditionals, loops, and dynamic flow control in shader programs. On the hardware side, some new features that were being introduced were higher precision (64-bit double support), multiple rendering buffers, increased GPU memory, and texture access.

The NVIDIA ...