[ykl]

I TA'd a rendering course once and wound up assigning a homework where the students implemented their own software rasterizers in CUDA. Before that homework, a lot of students didn't really understand what a rasterizer did. Afterwards, everyone got it.

[lfowles]

Do you have links to any resources the students found handy? I'm not very familiar with anything to do with the graphics stack other than familiarity with some of the words.

[nitrogen]

I'm not the author of the original comment, but when I was in high school I found the Graphics Programming Black Book to be useful for understanding graphics primitives and how they can be implemented in software. It's available for free online: http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/graphics-p...

Maybe start with chapter 38: http://downloads.gamedev.net/pdf/gpbb/gpbb38.pdf

[lfowles]

Thanks, this is a great read (even though parts seem dated, for example, the TOC has chapters on the 386 and 486), I'm surprised that I haven't stumbled upon it before.

[nitrogen]

The latest Core i7 still has all the same instructions as a 386 or 486, so while these days you'd probably use SIMD instructions, the code will still run and run very, very fast.