It was apparent early on the project that the GS plugin was going to be a big bottleneck during 3D scenes. It isn't that the GS plugin itself does a lot of computation on the CPU, but the fact that it needs to communicate with the graphics card means that unnecessary stalls will occur in the graphics driver as the GPU and CPU are synchronized. During these stalls, the CPU basically goes to lunch until the GPU is ready. Graphics drivers and libraries are aware of this and try as little as possible to communicate with the graphics card. They usually cache render state changes, shader changes, and texture changes up until actual geometry is rendered. They also take advantage of FIFOs (first in first out buffers). The CPU just writes to the FIFO and the GPU just reads from it, this makes all the difference in terms of keeping the GPU active while the CPU isn't and vise versa.
Graphics Synthesizer Gpus And Dual Cores
· 5 min read
