APPLICATION OF GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNITS IN VIDEO GAMES

1.1       INTRODUCTION

1.2       WHAT IS GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNITS

1.3       TYPES OF GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNITS

1.4       APPLICATION OF GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNIT IN VIDEO GAMES

1.5       BENEFITS OF USING GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNITS IN VIDEO GAMES

1.6       CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

Intel introduced the first video graphics controller (iSBX 275) in 1983. Then Texas Instruments (TMS34010, 1986), IBM (8514 Graphics System), etc. enhanced GPU applications. Throughout the 1990s, 2D graphical user interface (GUI) acceleration continued to evolve. The NVIDIA Corporation was the first to produce a chip capable of programmable shading (GeForce 3, early 2000s). Today (mid-2014), GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. Modern GPUs are very efficient in manipulating computer graphics, and their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than general-purpose CPUs for algorithms where processing large blocks of data is done in parallel. Since 2006 (with the introduction of the GeForce 8 series), NVIDIA has produced general purpose GPUs for scientific and engineering computation. For its GPUs, the company has also developed compute unified device architecture (CUDA), a parallel computing platform and programming model. Currently, many companies, including NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD/ATI, produce GPGPUs. Although the original GPU, a specialized electronic circuit, was designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display, now GPGPU computing offers exceptional application performance by offloading computation intensive parts of the application to the GPU, while the rest of the code runs on the CPU. Game engines are traditionally used for developing video games. In addition to standalone and online game machines, game engines are now being used for educational, medical, and military applications as well. A simple modern game engine is normally comprised of the following components: input, game logic, artificial intelligence (AI), physics (engine for collision detection/ response), audio (for sound), and graphics. A rendering engine called “renderer” is required for 2D or 3D graphics. Many subcomponents can comprise a component and together they form a complete package. Different levels of parallelism, such as task and data levels, can be used in game programming. When components in a game engine consist of many different types of middleware, the design of the library will most likely dictate which one is more suitable to use. Some middleware, such as the Bullet Physics Library, includes multithreading in its API. Depending on the type of multithreading model used, some level of data redundancy and mechanism to ensure data coherency is required to improve performance. To fulfill the performance requirement, game engines are adopting new hardware like multi core CPUs and software like multithreaded processing. (Abu Asaduzzaman  & Hin Y. Lee, 2014)

Parallelism is the future of computing. Future microprocessor development efforts will continue to concentrate on adding cores rather than increasing single-thread performance. It can be possible through GPU.

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a massively multi-threaded architecture and then is widely used for graphical and now non-graphical computations. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), works with Central Processing Units (CPUs) in PCs, are special purpose processors designed to efficiently perform the calculations necessary to generate visual output from program data. GPU has become into a powerful programmable processor, with both application programming interface (APIs) and hardware increasingly focusing on the programmable aspects of the GPU, so result is a processor with enormous arithmetic capability is GPU. GPU is a processor generally used for display, video, 2D/3D graphics and visual computing. It is parallel, multithreaded multiprocessor used for visual computing. It also provide real-time visual interaction with computed objects via graphics images, and video.GPU serves as both a programmable graphics processor and a scalable parallel computing platform. Graphics Processing Unit is also called Visual Processing Unit (VPU) is an electronic circuit designed to quickly operate and alter memory to increase speed the creation of images in frame buffer intended for output to display.(Ramani Shrusti K., Desai Vaishali J. & Karia Kruti K, 2015).