Article

A user-programmable vertex engine

Authors:

Mark J. Kilgard,

Henry MoretonAuthors Info & Claims

SIGGRAPH '01: Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques

Pages 149 - 158

https://doi.org/10.1145/383259.383274

Published: 01 August 2001 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we describe the design, programming interface, and implementation of a very efficient user-programmable vertex engine. The vertex engine of NVIDIA's GeForce3 GPU evolved from a highly tuned fixed-function pipeline requiring considerable knowledge to program. Programs operate only on a stream of independent vertices traversing the pipe. Embedded in the broader fixed function pipeline, our approach preserves parallelism sacrificed by previous approaches. The programmer is presented with a straightforward programming model, which is supported by transparent multi-threading and bypassing to preserve parallelism and performance.

In the remainder of the paper we discuss the motivation behind our design and contrast it with previous work. We present the programming model, the instruction set selection process, and details of the hardware implementation. Finally, we discuss important API design issues encountered when creating an interface to such a device. We close with thoughts about the future of programmable graphics devices.

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Cited By

Buck IFoley THorn DSugerman JFatahalian KHouston MHanrahan P(2023)Brook for GPUs: Stream Computing on Graphics HardwareSeminal Graphics Papers: Pushing the Boundaries, Volume 210.1145/3596711.3596716(29-38)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3596711.3596716
Tine BSaxena VSrivatsan SSimpson JAlzammar FCooper LKim HAamodt TJerger NSwift M(2023)Skybox: Open-Source Graphic Rendering on Programmable RISC-V GPUsProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 310.1145/3582016.3582024(616-630)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582016.3582024
Rosenfeld VBreß SMarkl V(2022)Query Processing on Heterogeneous CPU/GPU SystemsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/348512655:1(1-38)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2022
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Index Terms

A user-programmable vertex engine
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGGRAPH '01: Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques

August 2001

600 pages

ISBN:158113374X

DOI:10.1145/383259

Chairman:
Lynn Pocock
New York Inst. of Technology

Copyright © 2001 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 August 2001

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SIGGRAPH '01 Paper Acceptance Rate 65 of 300 submissions, 22%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,822 of 8,601 submissions, 21%

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Cited By

Buck IFoley THorn DSugerman JFatahalian KHouston MHanrahan P(2023)Brook for GPUs: Stream Computing on Graphics HardwareSeminal Graphics Papers: Pushing the Boundaries, Volume 210.1145/3596711.3596716(29-38)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3596711.3596716
Tine BSaxena VSrivatsan SSimpson JAlzammar FCooper LKim HAamodt TJerger NSwift M(2023)Skybox: Open-Source Graphic Rendering on Programmable RISC-V GPUsProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 310.1145/3582016.3582024(616-630)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582016.3582024
Rosenfeld VBreß SMarkl V(2022)Query Processing on Heterogeneous CPU/GPU SystemsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/348512655:1(1-38)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3485126
Saleh EShastry C(2022)General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units: From Fixed-Function Pipelines to Programmable Cores2022 4th International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communication Control and Networking (ICAC3N)10.1109/ICAC3N56670.2022.10074048(2064-2075)Online publication date: 16-Dec-2022
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Yin KGao JShugrina MKhamis SFidler S(2021)3DStyleNet: Creating 3D Shapes with Geometric and Texture Style Variations2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)10.1109/ICCV48922.2021.01223(12436-12445)Online publication date: Oct-2021
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Crawford LO'Boyle M(2019)Specialization Opportunities in Graphical Workloads2019 28th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT)10.1109/PACT.2019.00029(272-283)Online publication date: Sep-2019
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Aamodt TFung WRogers T(2018)General-Purpose Graphics Processor ArchitecturesSynthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture10.2200/S00848ED1V01Y201804CAC04413:2(1-140)Online publication date: 21-May-2018
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Kovac THaber TReeth FHens N(2018)Heterogeneous computing for epidemiological model fitting and simulationBMC Bioinformatics10.1186/s12859-018-2108-319:1Online publication date: 16-Mar-2018
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