Can anyone point me to some information on what a modern video card architecture looks like? I'm particularly interested in understanding how my rendering engine will be executed by the GPU.
Ideally, I'd get two answers: one related to today's monster video cards and one related to today's mobile GPU's.
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Thanks for the input so far. Considering the proprietary and changing nature of video card hardware, it seems there's not the ideal answer that I was looking for. So I'll clarify and ask a couple very specific questions. (I guess I was hoping to get a resource similar to http://www.realityprime.com/articles/scenegraphs-past-present-and-future which would generally provide me with lots of information on hardware that might be relevant to me.)
First off, I'm quite familiar with the OpenGL pipeline. A google-images search for my question title, "video card architecture," reveals diagrams of various video cards which naturally seem to match the graphics pipeline. While this makes sense, and is helpful, it leaves out some details. I'll try to get at a couple specifics.
1) What happens when a texture change (glBindTexture(), or new sampler specified) is issued? Obviously, the command is queued and later processed by the video card, but is the texture loaded immediately into cache, or not until something attempts to sample that texture? I would expect the latter, partly because the texture may not entirely fit into such caches to begin with. How big are these caches, anyway?
2) Older video cards had hardware dedicated specifically for a given type of shader. Newer video cards reuse the same hardware for all types of shaders. Are these "stream processors" typically shared with other computations throughout the pipeline, such as culling?
3) It seems that progress related to video card hardware has largely been lead by innovation in software. Are there any interesting cases where the opposite is true? I still hope that there might be some resource that gives a detailed history of video card design, similar to the scenegraphs article linked above.
4) Mobile GPU was an ambiguous term. I'm hoping that eBusiness assumed I meant mobile as in laptop when he called me ignorant -- I was rather referring to the GPUs embedded in modern cell phones and tablets.