Author Archives: Eric

Command buffers, JGT online, workstation cards charts

Vincent Scheib discusses how to implement command buffers (essentially, OpenGL display lists) on DirectX 9 and 10. He notes that DirectX 11 will have display list support in the API, but if you don’t want to wait 4+ years for general adoption of that API, consider Emergent’s method. By having various threads generate command buffers and a single thread executing these, they are able to take advantage of multiple cores. On a dual core they show x1.4 to x1.9 speedup with multiple threads. Best of all, they provide open source for their system, with a very liberal license.

I am happy to see that PDFs of articles in recent issues of the journal of graphics tools are now available online, free to current subscribers.

I’ll be adding this one to the portal and resources page: sets of charts listing the capabilities of professional graphics cards.

Giant displays, better division, NPR, and NVIDIA

In wading through my bookmark collection, there were a few sites that I felt were appropriate for the blog but not the resources pages. Basically, interesting tidbits, but not worth the (semi-)permanence of the website’s other pages.

First, Naty pointed out that NPR is used in the next Prince of Persia. Interesting style, and I look forward to seeing how well it animates. Update: Mikkel Gjøl at Zero Point Software pointed out that, with E3 just having happened, game trailers galore have come out, including an animated trailer for Prince of Persia.

I was trying to find what are the largest (highest resolution) commercial, or at least public, display systems available. Two I found: someone’s flight simulator setup, and the Zenview Command Center Elite. If you know of larger, please say so. Coolest death-star-related display system was easily The Emperor.

Tidbit: Intel division is still slow, but will someday be twice as fast.

There’s a quick little article in Forbes on NVIDIA. You already know 80% of it, but there are some new bits. Huang’s education at a reform school is a classic tale (though Wired’s piece is a little more detailed).

OK, my queue is now cleared!

Whew, done!

I just finished culling through about 200 sites and folding most into the resources and portal pages. I stored these up on del.icio.us over the past two years while writing the new edition; now they’re in (or deleted – amazing how quickly some of these sites go away).

The references page is also corrected, as some links and whatnot were dropped by my original perl script. We try to not repeat any articles listed here on the resources and portal pages, which is in one way unfortunate. Really, the references are the bulk of the serious resources.

I now feel like the site is officially open; please do send on any great resources that we’re missing (or just put them in the comments here).

ShaderX^2 books available for free download

Wolfgang Engel (editor in chief of the ShaderX series) kindly sent me copies of the two ShaderX^2 books last year, so that I could read through them and reference useful articles in writing the third edition of Real-Time Rendering (RTR3). He also provided us with the contents of the then-unpublished ShaderX^6 – he was a huge help in making RTR3 up-to-date.

While writing, I learnt that Wolfgang was willing to release the ShaderX^2 books electronically for free. However, he was advised by the publisher to check with the authors to see if they had any reservations. I like these books; some of the articles are dated, but there’s still solid material in many that should be made widely available. Also, I hated referencing articles in RTR3 that few people could actually go look up. Finally, I found that the PDFs of these two books were already being distributed illegally through a torrent. It struck me as unreasonable that the two ways to obtain these out-of-print books was through illegal downloading or through rather exorbitant prices in used-book markets (currently the prices are down in the $30 range; at one point last year the lowest price I saw for one of the books was $100).

Wolfgang didn’t have the time this Spring to gather permissions (he was busy at the time with GTA IV and other projects), and I wanted to begin to repay him for all his help. So, I spent some time these past two months getting permission release forms signed for the ShaderX^2 books. 66 article clearances later, I’m done! There were no objections from the authors, usually just the opposite, so the books are now generously being hosted for free download by gamedev.net:

ShaderX2: Introduction & Tutorials with DirectX 9

ShaderX2: Shader Programming Tips and Tricks with DirectX 9

The books are “ancient”, four years old, but there is some great material in them. Greg James’ article about rendering thick volumes has been cited by a number of later papers. I particularly enjoyed the articles by Mitchell et al. and Ansari in the Image Space section, as I love post-processing effects. They present lots of code snippets alongside solid theory. Which reminds me, we should also work on putting the CD-ROM’s contents up on the web – next task.

Also, the first ShaderX book has also been cleared for free download. Wolfgang is digging through his archives for a PDF version of this book, and I hope it will be available soon. In the meantime, all of the articles from authors at ATI (at the time) are available on the AMD/ATI website.

Update: see the ShaderX Books page at the ACM TOG site for a link to the first book and other related free resources.