Real-Time Rendering, Fourth Edition, 4th Edition

Chapter 23 Graphics Hardware

DOI: 10.1201/b22086-23

“When we get the final hardware, the performance

is just going to skyrocket.”

—J. Allard

Although graphics hardware is evolving at a rapid pace, there are some general concepts and architectures that are commonly used in its design. Our goal in this chapter is to give an understanding of the various hardware elements of a graphics system and how they relate to one another. Other parts of the book discuss their use with particular algorithms. Here, we present hardware on its own terms. We begin by describing how to rasterize lines and triangles, which is followed by a presentation of how the massive compute capabilities of a GPU work and how tasks are scheduled, including dealing with ...