General-purpose computing on graphics processing units: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:17, 12 October 2006

Revision as of 02:09, 18 October 2006

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For early fixed function or limited programmability graphics (i.e. up to and including DirectX8.1 compliant GPU's) this was sufficient because this is also the representation used in displays. This representation does have certain limitations, however. Given sufficient graphics processing power even graphics programmers would like to use better formats, such as [[floating point]] data formats, in order to obtain effects such as [[high dynamic range imaging]]. Many GPGPU applications require floating point accuracy, which came with graphics cards conforming to the DirectX9 specification.

DirectX9 Shader Model 2.x suggested the support of two precision types: full and partial precision. Full precision support could either be and FP24 (floating point 24-bit per component) or greater, while partial precision was FP16. [[ATI Technologies|ATI’s]] [[Radeon R300| R300 series]] of GPU’s supported FP24 precision only in the programmable fragment pipeline (although FP32 was supported in the vertex processors) while [[NVIDIA Corporation|NVIDIA’s]] [[GeForce FX|NV30]] series supported both FP16 and FP32; other vendors such as [[S3 Graphics]] and [[XGI Technology|XGI]] supported a mixture of formats up to FP24.

Shader Model 3.0 altered the specification, increasing full precision requirements to a minimum of FP32 support in the fragment pipeline. ATI’s Shader Model 3.0 compliant R5xx generation ([[Radeon R520|Radeon X1000 series]]) supports just FP32 throughout the pipeline while NVIDIA’s [[GeForce 6 Series|NV4x]] and [[GeForce 7 Series|G7x]] series continued to support both FP32 full precision and FP16 partial precisions. Although not stipulated by Shader Model 3.0, both ATI and NVIDIA’s Shader Model 3.0 GPU’s introduced support for blendable FP16 render targets, easier facilitating the support for High Dynamic Range Rendering.

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*[[Computed tomography|CT]] reconstruction

*[[Fast Fourier transform|Fast Fourier Transform]]

*[[Tone mapping|Tone mapping]]

*Sound Effects Processing

*Image/Video Processing