Multimedia processing on commodity graphics hardware

Driven by the need for interactive entertainment, modern PCs are equipped with specialized graphics processors (GPUs) for creation and display of images. These GPUs have become increasingly programmable, to the point that they now are capable of efficiently executing a significant number of computational kernels from non-graphical applications. In this introductory paper we first present a high-level overview of modern graphics hardwares architecture, then introduce programming tools available for application development on GPUs. Finally we present several multimedia applications that have been efficiently accelerated by GPUs.