high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

According to the current design trends, multithreaded multicore processors will be ubiquitous in every device. In computer gaming, chip-makers are adding more cores to fulfill the next generation performance requirements. A game engine has many ‘tasks’ and data parallelism is an important technique for concurrent execution of these tasks. However, effective implementation of multithreaded computer games has challenges including concurrent/parallel processing, data and task level parallelism, and thread synchronization. In this paper, we investigate the impact of data parallelism and graphics processing unit (GPU) technology on multicore game engines. We implement a multi-object interactive game engine in an 8-core workstation using single-threaded model (STM) and various multithreaded models. We also implement a high quality DXT compression (a family of implementations of the S3 texture compression algorithm) using GPU technique. Experimental results show that multithreaded synchronous model with data parallelism (MSMDP) outperforms STM by reducing execution time up to 50%. Results also show that for 448-thread data parallelism, more than 81x speed up can be achieved by applying GPU computing.