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Today’s high computational throughput probably would not be attainable without the application of the SIMD paradigm in modern processors in increasingly clever ways. It’s no coincidence that GPUs also gain most of their performance, die area, and efficiency benefits thanks to this instruction issue scheme. In this article we will explore a couple of examples of how GPUs may take advantage of SIMD and the implications of those on the programming model.

Multisampling is a well-understood technique used in computer graphics that enables applications to efficiently reduce geometry aliasing, yet not everybody is familiar with the entire toolset offered by modern GPU hardware to control multisampling behavior. In this article we present the behavior of basic multisampling and explore a set of controls that enable us to tune performance/quality trade-offs and open doors for more advanced rendering techniques.

The behavior of the graphics pipeline is practically standard across platforms and APIs, yet GPU vendors come up with unique solutions to accelerate it, the two major architecture types being tile-based and immediate-mode rendering GPUs. In this article we explore how they work, present their strengths/weaknesses, and discuss some of the implications the underlying GPU architecture may have on the efficiency of certain rendering algorithms.