GPU Gems 3

Foreword

Composition, the organization of elemental operations into a nonobvious whole, is the essence of imperative programming. The instruction set architecture (ISA) of a microprocessor is a versatile composition interface, which programmers of software renderers have used effectively and creatively in their quest for image realism. Early graphics hardware increased rendering performance, but often at a high cost in composability, and thus in programmability and application innovation. Hardware with microprocessor-like programmability did evolve (for example, the Ikonas Graphics System), but the dominant form of graphics hardware acceleration has been organized around a fixed sequence of rendering operations, often referred to as the graphics ...