How GPUs Work

See also https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-...

I read the article now, cool technical overview -- but basically all of these processor arch articles have a slant in all the paragraphs where they wax poetic (abstract, analysis/conclusion). I think it would be helpful for people to be aware of this...

AFAIK Nvidia (their company name is at the top of this paper btw in case u weren't paying attention) are trying to generalize their chips to the point where they can enter the CPU market, and Intel chips can render 3D graphics well enough to handle most games that are ~5 years old (since Haswell or maybe one or 2 gens before).

So this isn't a particularly slanted article but there is a fair amount of propaganda / contrived performance studies in this market... NVIDIA & Intel are vying for each other's core customer bases. Anyone interested in the field should dig up the articles that try to debunk perfomance myths as well as studying architecture overview.

(Some of the sentences in the last few paragraphs, for example, made me sorta queasy & would get shredded on Wikipedia.)

http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/courses/15869/fall2014/ http://15418.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2014/

I'll admit I only know the basics of GPU architecture, so please forgive/correct me if I'm wrong about something. However, I am just too curious not to share.

I'll try to explain. A frame buffer is nothing but a bunch of 1s and 0s in memory, meanwhile a monitor is just a bunch of 1s and 0s in pixels. We currently have the GPU write to memory in parallel and we currently write pixels to a monitor serially (and therefore interlacing). However, given the similarity between memory and pixels, why then can't we optimize a GPU to (parallely) write to pixels instead of memory. To the extreme, you could optimize, your GPU to have 1 shader per pixel, and since the shaders all run on the same clock cycle, the whole monitor would update simultaneously. I think that would be really cool and more importantly efficient. In more practical terms you would probably have 1 GPU shader be responsible for some group of pixels (so you only need 1 shader per 4x3 pixels or per 16x9 pixels).

So, before you say it, I get you might disagree with me when it comes to desktop GPUs, since 1. the GPU memory needs to be close to RAM (you don't want to have the GPU memory be on the other side of a "long" cable) 2. You would like to update the hardware for a GPU separately from your monitor. However, in something like Mobile/Oculus, the form factor is so small/tightly coupled already, I'm surprised optimizations like this aren't being looked into.

Am I just not up to date? Is there something fundamentally wrong in my logic? Does getting rid of the frame buffer/interlacing, not provide as much of a boost to make this worth while?