Hands-On High Performance Programming with Qt 5

Performance of the graphics pipeline

Graphics performance is measured in frames per second (FPS), that is, the number of frames that can be rendered in one second. FPS, in turn, depends on the time it takes to render a single frame. What are the factors that could slow the pipeline down?

Generally speaking, there can be three problems with graphics performance: either the CPU cannot provide the GPU with the data fast enough, or the GPU needs too long for rendering the data, or lastly, the communication between, CPU and GPU takes too long.

We will first have a look at internal GPU architecture again in order to discuss how the graphics pipeline gets influenced by the underlying hardware, which is depicted in the following diagram:

First, ...