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 that 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 3-D scene rendering. Because the computations involved in scene rendering are highly repetitive, substantial performance gains can be achieved through 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 function in...
