Game Development With Microsoft Directcompute

GAME DEVELOPMENT WITH MICROSOFT DIRECTCOMPUTE teaches the theories behind parallel computing and computing on the graphics card, and provides hands-on examples of real tasks that could be solved using the API in video game development. Traditionally, video games are developed using multithreaded architectures, but due to the hardware limits, the parallelization is limited to a handful of hardware-based threads. Microsoft DirectCompute is an application programming interface (API) that allows developers to extend the number of threads into the thousands by exposing the massively parallel architecture of modern graphics card processing to general purpose computing tasks. Written for experienced game developers and programmers, this book explains usage of the API, covers relevant theories of distributed computation with respect to video game development, contrasts existing methods of accessing the graphics card (shader programming), and provides discussion and examples of multiple applications for the API specific to video games.