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Gpu Tech Paper

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A Brief History of the Evolution of Graphics Processing Units
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is usually a dedicated processor whose main purpose is to do vast amounts of computations in order to build images to be displayed. In order to render the 3D graphics one sees in modern day games, the GPU must perform countless floating-point calculations. GPUs can be found on virtually all commonly used electronics today such as phones, computers, video game consoles, etc. The term “GPU” didn’t actually exist until 1999 when the company NVIDIA used the term while marketing their new graphics card called the GeForce 256 [3]. From the 1980’s until today, GPUs have gone through an exceptional amount of evolution with early graphics cards only …show more content…

This new generation of cards also moved away from the PCI bus (it was the slot where you plug your graphics card in) to a new Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) which allowed for the card to access system memory to help with complex operations such as texture-mapping [2,4].

Figure 2: Evolution of tasks between CPU and GPU from 1996 to 1999 [3]

No matter how great the performance increase with the GeForce 256, there was still one glaring problem. The pipeline was still fixed, and once the programmer sent the data into the pipeline, he/she had no control over it. This led to problems with the APIs such as OpenGL and DirectX. Since most of the functions in those APIs were hardware specific, if the APIs were ever updated with new and improved functions, the hardware could never use them since it was limited [2]. Logically, the next step in evolution must be a programmable pipeline in order to fix the problems stated above. Released in 2001, NVIDIA’s introduction of the GeForce 3 allowed programmers greater control over the pipeline by allowing them to send the data along with vertex and pixel shader programs giving the programmer more flexibility when it comes to creating images.

Figure 3: GeForce/DX7 Pixel Shading Pipeline [5]

Figure 4: GeForce3/DX8 Pixel Shading Pipeline [5]
These new shader programs allowed for the compartmentalizing of certain

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