Friday Fundamentals: A Great Graphics Overview

My February issue of IEEE Computer Magazine just arrived in the mail, and it contains a short-but-solid tutorial on the evolution of graphics processors, which I highly commend to your weekend reading list. As I read it, I re-traced in my mind my history of covering graphics for EDN; from the earliest chips that predominantly handled only back-end pixel-based functions and relied on proprietary APIs, to the incremental inclusion of hardware support for various steps in MPEG-2 decoding (aka the all-important DVD playback function), to the integration of hardware transform and lighting, and finally through the in-process transition from dedicated-function logic blocks to generic shader processors.

Along the way, the authors (David Leubke from Nvidia Research, and faculty member Greg Humphreys from the University of Virginia's Computer Science Department) explain both the motivations behind this evolution and the expanded set of capabilities (i.e. GPGPU) that the processors will subsequently be able to tackle. And, I'm happy to report, the article has an industry-wide perspective, versus an Nvidia-only slant.

While you're on the IEEE Computer site, I also recommend you check out Michael Macendonia's piece on the evolution of television, also from the February issue. I'll have more to say about mobile TV on handsets soon.