The CUDA Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to GPU Programming

Chapter 10. Texturing

10.1. Overview

In CUDA, a software technology for general-purpose parallel computing, texture support could not have been justified if the hardware hadn’t already been there, due to its graphics-accelerating heritage. Nevertheless, the texturing hardware accelerates enough useful operations that NVIDIA saw fit to include support. Although many CUDA applications may be built without ever using texture, some rely on it to be competitive with CPU-based code.

Texture mapping was invented to enable richer, more realistic-looking objects by enabling images to be “painted” onto geometry. Historically, the hardware interpolated texture coordinates along with the X, Y, and Z coordinates needed to render a triangle, and for each ...