NVIDIA GPU Gems revisits GPU sorting and why CPU round-trips are so costly
goyal__pramod · x · 2026-07-28
A classic NVIDIA GPU Gems chapter on improved GPU sorting is resurfacing.
- The chapter explains why sorting on the GPU matters for parallel workloads and why reading data back to the CPU is inefficient.
- It highlights a key idea from earlier work: using parallel bitonic merge sort on the GPU, then improving utilization further.
- The chapter also notes a useful property for graphics-style workloads: preserving the order of nearly sorted arrays during intermediate steps can improve responsiveness for effects like particle systems.
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