Post #2068681

2026-05-03 10:04 UTC

I don&#39;t wanna fall into a research rabbit hole, so I&#39;m putting this question on here. Regarding the history of #GPU / graphics cards hardware architecture, I know that these chips have evolved from the need to calculate floating point operations efficiently. Nowadays, GPUs prominently feature high parallel processing capabilities. Is this an evolution from the floating point thing or did it stem from another step in computer graphics like increasingly complex shading? :ReplyOK: :BoostOK:

Replies (3)

@Fissile@mastodon.art 2026-05-03 11:44

@Kiki@chaos.social Afaik they have been massively parallel for a while. Because you need to compute shaders for all pixels as fast as possible

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@sandzwerg@chaos.social 2026-05-03 14:23

@Kiki@chaos.social afaik GPU were always/for a long time more parallel than a CPU. That allowed them to process many graphics in parallel. But they had a much simpler instruction set and were less complex. That's all from memory though, I'd need to look up a source for that. I might have picked it up in university or a c't article or something.

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@picklish@weirder.earth 2026-05-03 18:15

@Kiki@chaos.social I am not an expert, but my informal understanding of graphics card hardware progression over time: * 1980's: 2d graphics support via cga -> ega -> vga progression; hardware so that your computer could display pictures that weren't a terminal; as more memory was available then it could switch from low color/palettes to 256 colors? * SNES Mode 7 Graphics is sort of an inbetween; hardware support to matrix transform a 2d buffer to make it appear 3d * opengl / 3dfx voodoo cards: framebuffer support (for depth buffered polygon drawings) and texture mapping units to perspective transform 2d textures onto polygons; these early cards didn't support 2d graphics either so you'd also need one of those; this eventually led into fixed-function pipelines, where there's a set of vertex/pixel shader transforms that you can control knobs for and have set variables you can tweak, but aren't programmatic. The Nintendo Wii is in this category as an advanced example.

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