Techniques for designing GPGPU games

The increasing level of realism in digital games depends not only on the enhancement of modeling and rendering effects, but also on the improvement of different aspects such as animation, characters artificial intelligence and physics simulation. Normally, games process most of their tasks in the CPU, using the GPU only for graphics processing. Several games and previous works also use GPU computing to process some selected non-graphics subtasks (normally the game physics), while the remaining tasks remain on the CPU. Such a processing partition is frequently pointed to as the bottleneck in these games, as it may induce several expensive data transfers between the CPU and GPU. This paper shows some game examples that execute all their methods entirely on the GPU using of a new GPU computing architecture for keeping the GPU-CPU communication to a minimum. Using the techniques explained in this paper, we present a game that can have an average optimization of about 25% when compared to traditional GPGPU game programing (i.e. only using GPGPU for physics and processing the AI in the CPU) and 200% when compared to traditional CPU programming.