30x Speedup of a Pointless C++ Game on a GPU

The author attempted to port a C++ program for playing the card game "Beggar My Neighbour" to a GPU for acceleration. Initially, GPU performance lagged far behind the CPU. Using the Nvidia Nsight Compute tool, the author identified thread divergence and memory access speed as bottlenecks. By transforming the algorithm into a state machine structure, and optimizing with lookup tables and shared memory, a 30x performance improvement was finally achieved, reaching 100 million game plays per second. The article details the optimization process and challenges encountered, offering valuable insights into GPU programming practices.