By Kurt Akeley and Pat Hanrahan
High-performance 3D graphics systems are now a part of almost every personal computer. In fact, the two major computational components of a PC are its main processor (CPU) and its graphics processor (now being referred to as the GPU). This course covers the architecture of graphics chips and systems. Topics include the key components of the graphics pipeline including the display, framebuffer, rasterization, texturing and geometry processing stages. More general topics include how graphics chips are different than main processors, and how to quantitatively model and evaluate graphics systems. Finally, we will cover trends in graphics hardware including programmable shading and ray tracing architectures. This course is targetted to both systems students interested in building graphics systems, as well as programmers interested in real-time graphics applications such as games.
Topics covering in detail
- Introduction (Kurt, Pat)
- The graphics pipeline (Pat)
- Nuts and bolts (Kurt)
- Performance analysis and characterization (Pat)
- Framebuffers and displays (Kurt)
- Rasterization (Kurt)
- Texturing (Pat)
- Geometry (Kurt)
- Parallelism and communication (Pat)
- Trends in Graphics Architectures, Tim Van Hook, ATI
- UNC High Performance Graphics Hardware, Anselmo Lastra, UNC
- Antialiasing (Kurt)
- Advanced texturing and shading (Pat)
- Programmable shading (Pat)
- Ray tracing (Pat)
- System issues (Kurt)
- The Design of OpenGL (Kurt)
- The Design of RenderMan (Pat)
- Final thoughts