Programmable Graphics Pipeline Architectures.fm

Current consumer graphics hardware, like NVIDIA's GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 chipset family or the ATI Radeon 8500 series, offers the possibility of replacing the fixed-function rendering pipeline with user-developed programs, usually referred to as shaders or shader programs. Newer generation cards, like the NVIDIA GeForce FX, ATI Radeon 9700, or cards based on 3Dlabs’ P10 chip, provide an extended programmability model that offers a larger instruction set and even dynamic flow control, transforming GPUs into highly programmable processors. Future generations of graphics hardware can be expected to further increase programmability. In the not too distant future, GPUs will become general purpose processors that cannot only perform graphics-oriented operations, but also other computations such as encryption in parallel to the host CPU.