85
edits
Changes
GPU
,→GPGPU
=GPGPU=
The traditional job of a GPU is to take the x,y,z coordinates of triangles, and map these triangles to screen-space through a matrix multiplication. And as the number of triangles and polygons grew to make more sophisticated models, GPUs would create massively parallel architectures capable of performing hundreds of millions billions of transformations hundreds of times per second.
These lists of triangles (as well as their colors, textures, reflectivity, and other attributes), were traditionally specified in a graphical language such as DirectX or OpenGL. But video game programmers demanded more and more flexibility from their hardware: such as lighting, transparency, reflections, and particles. This flexibility was granted with full scale programming languages, called vertex shaders or pixel shaders, where graphics programmers can customize the vertex-processing or pixel-processing portions of their graphical code.
