The Evolution of Computer Graphics Tony Tamasi SVP, Content & Technology, NVIDIA

• Make great images – intricate shapes – complex optical effects – seamless motion

• Make them fast – invent clever techniques – use every trick imaginable – build monster hardware

• Massively Parallel - 1000s of processors (today)

• Hardware managed parallelism – achievable performance

• Specialized processing – order of magnitude more efficient

• Latency Tolerant – throughput oriented

• Memory Bandwidth – saturate 100’s GB/sec

• Not cache dependent – ALU heavy architecture

Perspective study of a chalice Paolo Uccello, circa 1450

• Reality is 80 million polygons. Alvy Ray Smith 1999

Test Drive 6 Far Cry

1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 Multi-texture, Programmable vertex, Fragment programs, Transparency Double Precision 32b rendering 3D textures, shadow Color and depth antialiasing maps, multisampling compression

1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 16-bit depth, T&L, cube maps, Early z-cull, Flow control, Unified shader, Color, and Texture compression, Dual-monitor FP textures, geometry shader, textures Anisotropic filtering VTF CUDA/C

Ballistics Crysis

• Dawn of programmable shading • Vertex & Pixel Shaders • More (8) pixels per clock • Faster/Wider/Larger memory • 32-bit and higher precision

• GeForce® FX 5800 – Shader Model 2 – 4 ppc / 8tpc @ 500 Mhz – Single precision – AGP8x – 128b 16GB/sec memory system – 4 processors @ 500 MHz – Single threaded – massive SIMD width

– Programmed in OpenGL, DirectX or assembly

Riva GeForce 128ZX FX5800 1998 2003 Texture Performance (tex/s) 0.1G 4 G

Antialiasing Performance (sam/s) 0.1G 2 G

Depth Performance (pix/s) 0.1G 4 G

Floating Point Performance (FLOPS) n/a 12 G

Memory Bandwidth (B/s) 1.6G 16 G

Vertex Transform & Lighting • Key abstraction of real-time graphics

Triangle Setup & Rasterization • Hardware used to look like this

Texturing & Pixel Shading • Distinct chips/boards/units per stage

Depth Test & Blending • Fixed data flow through pipeline

Framebuffer

Vertex Vertex Vertex Vertex Vertex Vertex Vertex Vertex Shader Shader Shader Shader Shader Shader Shader Shader Triangle Setup Depth Cull

Texture Texture Texture Texture Texture Texture Texture Texture

Pixel Pixel Pixel Pixel Pixel Pixel Pixel Pixel Shader Shader Shader Shader Shader Shader Shader Shader Blend / Blend / Blend / Blend / Blend / Blend / Blend / Blend / Depth Depth Depth Depth Depth Depth Depth Depth

Memory Memory Memory Memory Memory Memory Memory Memory

Texture Antialiasing Depth Floating Point Bandwidth

3200000

160000

8000

400

1 Ti4600 GeForce GeForce GeForce GeForce 800 Ultra GeForce3 GeForce4 GeForce4 7900 GTX 8800 GTX 7800 GTX GPU 2008 GPU 2009 GPU 2011 GPU 2012 GPU 2013 Riva TNT2 GeForce 6 FX (5800?) GPU 20010 GeForce GTS

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

Compound Annual Growth Rate

Texture Performance 1.9

Antialiasing Performance 2.2

Depth Performance 1.9

Floating Point Performance 2.3

Memory Bandwidth 1.6

CAGR GeForce Projection GeForce 1998 – 2007 FX (2003) GPU 2008 GTX 200

Texture Performance (tex/s) 1.9 4 G 71 G 48 G

Antialiasing Performance (sam/s) 2.2 2 G 252 G 153 G

Depth Performance (pix/s) 1.9 4 G 52 G 38 G

Floating Point Performance (FLOPS) 2.3 12 G 752 G 1080 G

Memory Bandwidth (B/s) 1.6 16 G 133 G 141 G Within 10%

Programmable Graphics CUDA – DX11 – Future

Programmable Shaders DX8 –DX9 –DX10

Fixed-Function Pipelines “3D Accelerators”

G80 Next RIVA 128 GeForce 3 GTX200 GeForce 6 CUDA Gen

• Dawn of fully programmable generation • Unified architectures • New graphics functionality – geometry shading • Programmable in C

Vertex • Remains a useful abstraction

Rasterize • Hardware used to look like this

Pixel

Test & Blend

Framebuffer

Vertex shaders, pixel shaders, etc. become threads

Pixel Shader

Idle hardware Heavy Geometry Workload Perf = 4

Vertex Shader

Idle hardware

Pixel Shader

Unified Shader

Vertex Workload

Pixel

Heavy Geometry Workload Perf = 11

Unified Shader

Pixel Workload

Vertex

• GeForce® GTX 200 – Shader Model 4 – Double precision – PCI-Express Gen2 – 512b 140GB/sec memory system – 32ppc / 80 tpc @ 600 Mhz – 240 processors @ 1.5 GHz – Many threaded – scalar

– Programmed in OpenGL, DirectX, CUDATM C

Dataflow Manager Memory & I/O Memory & I/O Processor Processor Processor Processor . . . Special Purpose Special Purpose Special Purpose Special Purpose L1 L1 L1 L1 L1

Processor Communication Fabric

Far Cry 2 - Ubisoft Grid - Codemasters

Virtual Pipeline 2003 2005 2008 Fragment programs, Transparency, Double precision Color and depth antialiasing Preemption compression

2004 2006 Flow control, Unified shader, C++ FP textures, geometry shader, VTF CUDA/C Complete pointer support Adaptive Workload Partitioning

• Arbitrary dataflow • General purpose programming model • Special purpose hardware • Hardware managed threading and pipelining • Freely intermingle “graphics” & computation

Texture Antialiasing Depth Floating Point Bandwidth

3200000

160000

8000

400

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

CAGR GeForce GTX GPU 2013 1998 - 2007 200

Texture Performance (tex/s) 1.9 48 G 1+ T

Antialiasing Performance (sam/s) 2.2 153 G 10+ T

Depth Performance (pix/s) 1.9 38 G 1+ T

Floating Point Performance (FLOPS) 2.3 1080 G 20+ T

Memory Bandwidth (B/s) 1.6 141 G 1+ T

Detailed Characters

Ambient Occlusion Indirect Lighting Subsurface Scatter

• Programmable and Specialized Processing

• Monster performance and power efficiency

• Graphics and Arbitrary C/C++ Programming

• Global Illumination and Rasterization

• Rendering and Simulation

…Evolution