Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11

10 Image Processing

The addition of the compute shader to Direct3D 11 is arguably one of its most interesting new features. The compute shader provides a distinctly different technique for using the GPU hardware, and there are many new algorithms that can be implemented with these new abilities. One area in particular that can benefit from the compute shader is the image processing domain. Since the GPU’s roots are in image generation and manipulation, it is a natural extension to include general image processing capabilities in the realm of available algorithms. Figure 10.1 demonstrates the results of a blurring filter applied to half of an image.

Figure 10.1. An example image with a blurring filter applied to its right side.

In fact, the compute ...