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DirectCompute Programming Guide PG-05629-001_v3.2 | 4
INTRODUCTION
It is now widely accepted that the GPU has evolved into a highly capable general
purpose processor capable of improving the performance of a wide variety of parallel
applications beyond graphics. NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture has led the way in proving
the compute capabilities of the GPU, and provides the infrastructure that
DirectCompute is built on.
At the same time, Microsoft’s DirectX APIs have matured into the standard interface for
utilizing graphics hardware on Windows platforms, both for video games and consumer
graphics applications such as photo and video editing.
The introduction of DirectCompute allows developers to take advantage of the massive
parallel computation abilities of today’s GPUs directly from within DirectX applications,
without the need to use a separate compute API.
It is supported on both current DirectX 10 hardware (NVIDIA GeForce 8 series and
later) and forthcoming DirectX 11 GPU hardware.
THE COMPUTE SHADER
DirectCompute exposes the compute functionality of the GPU as a new type of shader -
the compute shader, which is very similar to the existing vertex, pixel and geometry
shaders, but with much more general purpose processing capabilities.
The compute shader is not attached specifically to any stage of the graphics pipeline, but
interacts with the other stages via graphics resources such as render targets, buffers and
textures.
Unlike a vertex shader (which is executed once for each input vertex), or a pixel shader
(which is executed once for each pixel), the compute shader doesn’t have to have a fixed
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