Overview / Usage

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is an implementation of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) using a divide-and-conquer approach. A DFT can transform any discrete signal, such as an image, to and from the frequency domain. Once in the frequency domain, many effects that are generally expensive in the image domain become trivial and inexpensive. The transformations between the image domain and frequency domain can incur significant overhead. This sample demonstrates an optimized FFT that uses compute shaders and Shared Local Memory (SLM) to improve performance by reducing memory bandwidth.

Two techniques for performing the FFT will be discussed in this sample. The first technique is called the UAV technique and operates by ping-ponging data repeatedly between Unordered Access Views (UAVs). The second technique, the SLM (Shared Local Memory) technique, is a more memory-bandwidth-efficient method, showing significant performance gains when bottlenecked by memory bandwidth.

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