Cg
Published 1 July 2003
William R. Mark, R. Steven Glanville, Kurt Akeley, Mark J. Kilgard
Citations541
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
Study Snapshot
ObjectiveStudy objective
MethodsResearch methodology
PopulationPopulation studied
Sample sizeSample sizes
OutcomesStudy outcomes here
ResultsStudy results comes here
LimitationsResearch study limitations comes here
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
A programming language and supporting system that are designed for programming programmable floating-point vertex and fragment processors, with support for data-dependent control flow in the vertex processor.
Abstract
The latest real-time graphics architectures include programmable floating-point vertex and fragment processors, with support for data-dependent control flow in the vertex processor. We present a programming language and a supporting system that are designed for programming these stream processors. The language follows the philosophy of C, in that it is a hardware-oriented, general-purpose language, rather than an application-specific shading language. The language includes a variety of facilities designed to support the key architectural features of programmable graphics processors, and is designed to support multiple generations of graphics architectures with different levels of functionality. The system supports both of the major 3D graphics APIs: OpenGL and Direct3D. This paper identifies many of the choices that we faced as we designed the system, and explains why we made the decisions that we did.
Keywords
Computer Science
The C Programming Language
1,770 Citations1978Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie
Lecture notes in computer scienceStreamIt: A Language for Streaming Applications
1,107 Citations2002William Thies, Michal Karczmarek +1 more
The StreamIt language provides novel high-level representations to improve programmer productivity and program robustness within the streaming domain and the StreamIt compiler aims to improve the performance of streaming applications via stream-specific analyses and optimizations.
Cambridge University Press eBooksDigital Systems Engineering
841 Citations1998William J. Dally, John W. Poulton
The techniques described in this book, which were once used only in supercomputers, are now essential to the correct and efficient operation of any type of digital system.
Shade trees
456 Citations1984Robert L. Cook
IRIS performer
441 Citations1994John H. Rohlf, James D. Helman
The paper illuminates and addresses performance issues fundamental to immediate-mode graphics and coarse-grained, pipelined multiprocessing and discusses support for intersection detection, fixed-frame rates, run-time profiling and special effects such as geometric morphing.
The OpenGL Graphics System: A Specification
421 Citations2004Mark Segal, Kurt Akeley
Continuous, uninterrupted paying of paper tape into a cable-making machine is made possible at high speed by an accumulating chamber for a folded supply of the tape.
Exploiting superword level parallelism with multimedia instruction sets
376 Citations2000S. Larsen, Saman Amarasinghe
This paper has developed a simple and robust compiler for detecting SLPP that targets basic blocks rather than loop nests, and is able to exploit parallelism both across loop iterations and within basic blocks.
A user-programmable vertex engine
325 Citations2001Erik Lindholm, Mark J. Kilgard +1 more
The design, programming interface, and implementation of a very efficient user-programmable vertex engine embedded in the broader fixed function pipeline, supported by transparent multi-threading and bypassing to preserve parallelism and performance is described.
Acta InformaticaA survey of stream processing
321 Citations1997Robert Stephens
An analysis of the development of each of these specialized topics to determine if a general theory of stream processing has emerged is presented, including a comparison of the semantic models that are used to formalize stream based computation.
CERN Document Server (European Organization for Nuclear Research)The CG Tutorial: The Definitive Guide to Programmable Real-Time Graphics
304 Citations2003Randima Fernando, Mark J. Kilgard
This book is a tutorial to teach you how to write Cg, the premier language for programmable graphics hardware, and many of the programmable shading techniques that are employed so successfully in offline rendering can enter the realm of real-time graphics.
Reality Engine graphics
302 Citations1993Kurt Akeley
The architecture of the RealityEngine graphics system is described, then some of the decisions made during its design are justified, resulting in a measured fill rate of over 240 million antialiased, texture mapped pixels per second.
PixelFlow: high-speed rendering using image composition
278 Citations1992Steven Molnar, John Eyles +1 more
PixelFlow is described, an architecture for high-speed image generation that overcomes the transformation-and frame-buffer– access bottlenecks of conventional hardware rendering architectures and performs antialiasing by supersampling.
The Imagine Stream Processor
230 Citations2003Ujval J. Kapasi, William J. Dally +3 more
The Imagine architecture and programming model is presented in the first half and the scalability of the Imagine architecture is explored in the second half to provide a scalable architecture that supports 48 ALUs on a single chip.
A language for shading and lighting calculations
178 Citations1990Pat Hanrahan, Jim Lawson
The design of a new shading language based on previous work of Cook and Perlin is discussed, which has various types of shaders for light sources and surface reflectances, point and color data types, control flow constructs that support the casting of outgoing and the integration of incident light, and a clearly specified interface to the rendering system using global state variables.
A real-time procedural shading system for programmable graphics hardware
162 Citations2001Kekoa Proudfoot, William R. Mark +2 more
This work has developed a real-time procedural shading language system that allows a single procedure to include operations from more than one computation frequency and is able to generate highly-optimized code.
Interactive multi-pass programmable shading
158 Citations2000Mark S. Peercy, Marc Olano +2 more
This work treats the OpenGL architecture as a general SIMD computer, and translates the high-level shading description into OpenGL rendering passes, which removes the shading language constraints by minimally extending OpenGL.
The development of the C language
121 Citations1993Dennis M. Ritchie
The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system, and evolved a type structure that has become one of the dominant languages of today.
A shading language on graphics hardware
99 Citations1998Marc Olano, Anselmo Lastra
This paper has created a parallel graphics multicomputer, PixelFlow, that can render images at 30 frames per second using a shading language, and is the first system to be able to support a shading Language in real-time.
SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Conference On Graphics HardwareShader metaprogramming
98 Citations2002Michael McCool, Zheng Qin +1 more
It is possible, using standard C++, to define a high-level shading language directly in the API that permits more direct interaction with the specification of textures and parameters, simplifies implementation, and enables on-the-fly generation, manipulation, and specialization of shader programs.
A programming system for the imagine media processor
95 Citations2002William J. Dally, Peter Mattson
Experimental results for a set of image processing, signal processing, and graphics benchmarks show that communication scheduling delivers schedule lengths for an Imagine Media Processor with multiple partitioned register files and shared interconnect that are within 1% of the same architecture with one multi-ported register file that is estimated to be eight times larger.
Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)Efficient partitioning of fragment shaders for multipass rendering on programmable graphics hardware
34 Citations2002Eric R. Chan, Ren Ng +3 more
Data Parallel Computation on Graphics Hardware
24 Citations2003Ian Buck, Pat Hanrahan
This paper presents a stream processor abstraction for performing data parallel computation using graphics hardware that represents an accurate computational model for today’s hardware but it also captures the underlying advantage of computing on graphics hardware.
Shader-driven compilation of rendering assets
13 Citations2002Paul Lalonde, Eric A. Schenk
A system in which pre-processing is done in a compilation process in which the geometric data are processed with knowledge of their shading programs, and a code stream is assembled that describes the manipulations required to render these data structures.
Compiling to a VLIW fragment pipeline
12 Citations2001William R. Mark, Kekoa Proudfoot
The algorithms used by this system to generate and optimize fragment code for NVIDIA's register combiner architecture are described and it is shown that the compiler generates efficient code.
ACM SIGPLAN NoticesParallel computers for graphics applications
7 Citations1987Adam Levinthal, Pat Hanrahan +2 more
The harvest system
5 Citations1960Paul S. Herwitz, James H. Pomerene
The Harvest System is a large-scale data processor designed for maximum performance in handling extremely large amounts of data in primarily non-arithmetic operations.
Parallel computers for graphics applications
3 Citations1987Adam Levinthal, Pat Hanrahan +2 more
Two processors are presented that use parallel SIMD data paths to support common graphics data structures as primitive operands in arithmetic expressions to provide better price/performance than general purpose designs.
Apress eBooksCommon Type System
2 Citations2004Gregory S. MacBeth
Identifiers are used to describe allocated memory types such as integer, longs, classes, and other types defined by C# or by you, as the developer.