Graphics Architecture, Winter 2009

In our final content lecture, we look at how to parallelize the graphics pipeline. What is challenging about parallelizing the GPU? What are the ways we could parallelize it? We discuss the sorting taxonomy of parallelism strategies, look at different ways to communicate within a multi-node system, and analyze the taxonomy using historical graphics architectures.

Jeremy Sugerman from Stanford describes GRAMPS, a programming model for graphics pipelines and heterogeneous parallelism.

We turn away from a fixed-function graphics pipeline and explore what we can do with a user-programmable pipeline, where not only pipeline stages but also the structure of the pipeline can be customized. We look at Reyes, delay streams, and the programmable culling unit.

This lecture contains the overflow from the 4 pipeline lectures, mostly the composition/display lecture.

The final stage of the graphics pipeline is composition/display. In this lecture we look at antialiasing algorithms, compositing, the depth buffer, and monitors. [Note: The beginning part of this lecture is the remainder of the rasterization lecture, and this lecture spills into the overflow lecture.]

John Nickolls, chief compute architect for NVIDIA's GPUs,

discusses NVIDIA GPU graphics and compute architecture.

Texturing is the process of applying images to geometry. We look at the function of texture and how we filter texture, and then how graphics hardware has implemented texturing. We also look at texture caching and texture compression. [Note: The first part of this lecture is the remainder of the rasterization lecture, and texturing spills into the next "composition/display" lecture.]

Justin Hensley of AMD/ATI Graphics describes the latest GPUs from AMD's ATI Graphics division.

Rasterization is the GPU stage that produces fragments from screen-space triangles. We look at both pixel coverage and parameter interpolation algorithms. We also discuss perspective correction and look at historical SGI machines.

[Note: The rasterization part of this lecture starts in the middle of the lecture and spills over into the texture lecture.]

In this lecture, we take a close look at the geometry stage of the graphics pipeline: transformations, homogeneous coordinates, the OpenGL lighting model, primitive assembly, clipping, and culling. We also look at ways to save computation and bandwidth: vertex arrays, vertex caches, and geometry compression. [Note: This lecture spills over into the "rasterization" lecture.]