|
Graphics processing unit
There are various applications that require a 3D world
to be simulated as realistically as possible on a computer screen. These
include 3D animations in games, movies and other real world simulations.
It takes a lot of computing power to represent a 3D world due to the great
amount of information that must be used to generate a realistic 3D world
and the complex mathematical operations that must be used to project this
3D world onto a computer screen. In this situation, the processing time
and bandwidth are at a premium due to large amounts of both computation
and data.
The functional purpose of a GPU then, is to provide a
separate dedicated graphics resources, including a graphics processor and
memory, to relieve some of the burden off of the main system resources,
namely the Central Processing Unit, Main Memory, and the System Bus, which
would otherwise get saturated with graphical operations and I/O requests.
The abstract goal of a GPU, however, is to enable a representation of a 3D
world as realistically as possible. So these GPUs are designed to provide
additional computational power that is customized specifically to perform
these 3D tasks
|