Graphics displays
In the domains of gaming, video editing, graphic design, and animation, video processing performance is critical. Generating and displaying high-resolution graphics requires an enormous number of mathematical calculations.
While general-purpose processors can perform the necessary computations, such processors lack the performance users of these applications have come to expect.
High-performance graphics cards, called graphics processing units (GPUs), are essentially miniature supercomputers, heavily optimized to perform graphical computational tasks such as 3D scene rendering. Because the computations involved in scene rendering are highly repetitive, substantial performance gains can be achieved with the use of hardware parallelization. Graphics processors contain a large number of relatively simple computational units, each performing a small portion of the overall task.
A GPU may contain thousands of individual processing units that each function...
