EE 7700-2 - References

References for material covered in lectures and needed to complete the assignments. This page will be updated as the semester progresses.

When available, links are provided to full-text versions of the material. If a dialog pops up asking for a username and password use "ee4720" as the username and use the password given in class. This does not apply to the ACM digital library material. Some of the material is copyrighted and requires a subscription (e.g., ACM Digital Library) or one-time payment for access.

Graphics Processor APIs

OpenGL

The OpenGL Specification
A description of the OpenGL API to 3D graphics acceleration hardware.
Mark Segal, Kurt Akeley, “The OpenGL Graphics System: A Specification (Version 2.1)” (2.70 MB PDF)

Shader Language APIs

OpenGL Shading Language
C-like language used to program shaders.
John Kessenich, “The OpenGL Shading Language” (606 kB PDF)
Survey of Shader Languages
A good survey of shader language APIs, though a bit outdated. Also avaialble from the XEngine project website.
Martin Ecker, "Programmable Graphics Pipeline Architectures", XEngine, March 2003. (373 kB PDF)

GPGPU (General-Purpose Graphics Processor Unit)

NVIDIA CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture)
CUDA is an API for using a GPU for computation, the computation might be part of a scientific or engineering simulation (the most common application). This programming guide describes CUDA itself but also provides details of some NVIDIA GPUs, including the 8800 series.
NVIDIA, “NVIDIA CUDA Compute Unified Device Architecture Programming Guide Version 1.0,” 23 June 2007. (1.15 MB PDF)

Graphics Processor Descriptions

NVIDIA GeForce3 GPU
A reasonably detailed description of an early programmable GPU. For more details see the intermediate language specification matching the processor, NV_vertex_program.
Erik Lindholm, Mark J. Kilgard, Henry Moreton, “A User-Programmable Vertex Engine,” SIGGRAPH 2001, p.149- (12.1 MB PDF)
NVIDIA GeForce6800 GPU
A reasonably detailed description.
John Montrym and Henry Moreton, “The GeForce 6800,” IEEE Micro Magazine, vol. 25, no. 2, March 2005, pp. 41-51. (568 kB PDF)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GPU
Relatively little detail but does cover all major parts of the processor. More information can be gleaned from the CUDA documentation (under GPGPU, above). Also see the GeForce-8800-specific OpenGL extensions.
NVIDIA, “NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GPU Architecture Overview,” NVIDIA Technical Brief TB-02787-001_v01, November 2006. (3.73 MB PDF)
ATI R5xx Series
A detailed description of the CPU/GPU interface, intended for device driver writers. Could use some editing.
AMD, "Radeon R5xx Acceleration," manufacturer documentation. (3.13 MB PDF)