Graphics processing unit

From Tech Artists Wiki

Please see the Wikipedia article on GPU's for general purpose GPU info. The specifics of using a GPU are better covered in other articles on this Wiki (such as in the Shaders Category and Shaders Portal), but some generally applicable GPU info will be given here.

Specifically, a GPU is a parellel processor for floating point operations. The fact that it works in parellel makes it extremely fast, but also limited. A GPU is essentially a bundle of pipes- every pipe is cut off from one another except at the start and end. That is the most serious limitation of GPU's, but new hardware is making it less of a restriction (such as DirectX 10).

In addition to graphics, other types of general purpose computing can be done on the GPU. Work is also being done on using the GPU for physics and particle simulation. Many programs even recently done on the CPU- not only realtime things like Vertex Skinning but also actions like DDS and normal map generation can be done on the GPU at a speed many times that of the CPU. Interesting pre-processing can be done on the GPU as well, such as the blending of skeletal animations or blendshapes (see Using Textures to Store Data for more info).