Having seen way too much bloom on the Atacama Desert map for the Russian pilots in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (my current addiction, e.g. this and this), I can relate.

Edit: please do read the comments for why both pairs of images are wrong. I’m so used to HDR == tone mapping that I pretty much forgot the top pair is also technically incorrect (HDR is the range of the data, tone mapping can take such data and map it nicely to a displayable 8-bit image without banding) – thank you, Jaakko.

• Naty passed on this blog post about RGBD, a compact way of storing HDR environment map colors.
• Gamasutra has an excerpt from Game Engine Architecture, a book we’ve mentioned before. Added bonus info on the author, Jason Gregory: he was a lead programmer on Uncharted 2 (which my older son loves, as do many others).
• Manny Ko mentioned the free program Mendeley, which he swears by for organizing his PDF collection of graphics papers. I’ll look into it once I’ve reloaded everything after my Windows 7 upgrade.
• Physics in graphics? Here’s one person’s extensive collection of abstracts through 2005.
• From Nicholas Wilt, interesting to hear how one brokerage firm is now using GPUs to run complex simulations for bond prices. That GPU Gems chapter on options pricing was prescient.
• Speaking of brokers and lots of GPUs, there’s this article. I’m a little skeptical of a GPU cloud for graphics (vs. running OpenCL), since graphics cards are not quite interchangeable parts at this point. Also, CPUs don’t normally need driver updates, GPUs do. OTOY I’m super-skeptical about, I have to admit, though I’d love to see them pull it off. Anyway, fun to think about situations where network bandwidth > graphics compute power and cloud cost < local cost.
• One more from the demoscene, Farbrausch’s The Cube – interesting effects, what looks like procedural clips and procedural surfaces using interior mapping. At least, that’s my guess. I wish they would spend a little time explaining what they did, though maybe that would ruin the magic.