4 ms·
GPUs can take in way more than just triangles as input. There are particle simulation and even Ray tracing implemented on GPUs nowadays. Support for parametric
by manfredo 7y ago
GPUs can take in way more than just triangles as input. There are particle simulation and even Ray tracing implemented on GPUs nowadays. Support for parametric curves was one of the more recent additions.
- Jasper_ 7y agoThat's a very... naive view of how a GPU works. Particle simulation is done in compute, and ray tracing, as implemented in RTX/DXR, is done on a soup of triangles. The core of rasterization is still done on triangles, and can't easily be done in compute. Have any references to parametric curves on GPUs? All the approaches I know of, like the recent mesh shader work, still output triangle meshes.
- fulafel 7y ago"In compute" just means that there aren't inputs and outputs related to the current output frame in the calculation job - the computational possibilities are the same. Triangles aren't necessarily involved in in rendering either, see eg how the stuff on shadertoy.com works.
- manfredo 7y agoThis is from 2007: https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-iv-image-effects/chapter-25-rendering-vector-art-gpu https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-iv-image-... Again, the vast majority of use cases for GPUs is 3d vertex graphics. But they're capable of more than that. Modern GPUs are very different from early GPUs that only worked with triangles. Some of the early ones were actually ASICs, and couldn't even load different shader programs.