Michael Kenzel is a research assistant at Graz University of Technology, Austria, working in the area of High-Performance Graphics and GPU Programming. He graduated with an MSc in Information and Computer Engineering from Graz University of Technology in 2013 and is currently working to obtain his PhD in Computer Science from Graz University of Technology. His research interests include real-time rendering and the application of GPU compute in graphics as well as massively-parallel computing in general, with a focus on novel programming models for dealing with dynamic, heterogeneous workloads on the GPU.
Driven by the demands of an ever-growing spectrum of ever more sophisticated graphics applications, the modern GPU evolved into a fully-programmable, massively-parallel processor. Real-time rendering, however, is still almost exclusively based on the hardware graphics pipeline. While more and more programmable stages have been added over the years, the basic structure and operation of the hardware graphics pipeline has effectively remained unchanged for decades. In our work, we investigate the potential of using the powerful general-purpose compute cores of the modern GPU to build graphics pipelines for applications rather than applications for a graphics pipeline…