[4eyes] GPU programming

[Cha Lee]

Hey Sehwan,

It depends on what kind of programming you want to do.  The GPU Gems series is great if you want to program for the classic shader pipeline, but its not very useful if your intent is to program for the new shader model.

I can't remember exactly where the break off occurs, but the GeForce 8 series and above all support the new shading model.  Before that you had your regular vertex and pixel/frament shaders.  After that it has been broken into vertex, geometry, and pixel/frament shaders with the unified shader architecture.  Theres a ton of information online.

I would suggest you start out with Cg, NVidia's shader api, b/c it has more examples and documentations plus it will support all their new stuff.  You can download it from their developer website.  Also, you may be interested in using CUDA, their parallel processing language on the GPU.  It can be tied directly with your shaders and can increase your framerate greatly.  This can also be found on NVidia's website.  In general I've found that the really good info on the new shader stuff can only be found online.  Its still very new and no good books really exist yet (in my opinion).

Lastly, you should always check the specs on each card you use manually.  They will all say which version of OpenGL or DirectX they support.  If you look at the different versions of OpenGL or DirectX they will tell you what they can do (Wikipedia has great info on this).

thanks,



Cha Lee


Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2008 14:58:12 -0700
From: jonathan.d.ventura at gmail.com
To: ilab-users at lists.cs.ucsb.edu
Subject: Re: [4eyes] GPU programming

Hi Sehwan,
I have been learning GPU programming with the help of Steve at Adobe.  I think GeForce 6 and beyond are probably the best -- not quite sure about the differences between cards.  I found the tutorials and sample code from gpgpu.org really helpful.

Good luck!
Jon

On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 12:32 PM, Sehwan Kim <skim at cs.ucsb.edu> wrote:

Hi, guys.
 
I am starting to learn about GPU programmings.
If anyone has some experience about the GPU programmings, 
would you let me know which books are great for a newbie like me?

It would also be helpful to inform me of some useful websites. :)
 
One of aims is to generate voxels for about 1,000,000 3D color points, 
and render them less than 0.5 sec/frame. Actually, as fast as possible.
 
In addition, 
How can I check a graphics card could be used for GPU programmings or not?
 
thanks.
-- 
Best,
Sehwan


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