{"id":2666,"date":"2011-10-13T19:41:30","date_gmt":"2011-10-14T01:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=2666"},"modified":"2011-10-14T06:45:58","modified_gmt":"2011-10-14T12:45:58","slug":"seven-things-for-10132011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/seven-things-for-10132011\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven Things for 10\/13\/2011"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Fairly new book: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/1568817207?tag=realtimerenderin\"><em>Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11<\/em><\/a>, by Jason Zink, Matt Pettineo, and Jack Hoxley, A.K.Peters\/CRC Press, July 2011 (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.crcpress.com\/product\/isbn\/9781568817200\">more info<\/a>). It&#8217;s meant for people who already know DirectX 10 and want to learn just the new stuff. I found the first half pretty abstract; the second half was more useful, as it gives in-depth explanation of practical examples that show how the new functionality can be used.<\/li>\n<li>Two nice little Moore&#8217;s Law-related articles appeared recently in <em>The Economist<\/em>. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/node\/21526322\">This one<\/a> is about how the law looks to have legs for a number of more years, and presents a graph showing how various breakthroughs have kept the law going over the past decades. Moore himself thought the law might hold for ten years. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/blogs\/dailychart\/2011\/10\/computing-power\">This one<\/a> talks about how computational energy efficiency is doubling every 18 months, which is great news for mobile devices.<\/li>\n<li>I used to use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mirekw.com\/winfreeware\/mwsnap.html\">MWSnap<\/a> for screen captures, but it doesn&#8217;t work well with two monitors and it hangs at times.\u00a0I finally found a replacement that does all the things I want, with a mostly-good UI: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.faststone.org\/FSCaptureDetail.htm\">FastStone Capture<\/a>. The downside is that it actually costs money ($19.95), but I&#8217;m happy to have purchased it.<\/li>\n<li>Ray tracing vs. rasterization, part XIV: <a href=\"http:\/\/altdevblogaday.com\/2011\/09\/19\/why-i-still-think-ray-tracing-is-the-future\/\">Gavan Woolery<\/a> thinks RT is the future, <a href=\"http:\/\/c0de517e.blogspot.com\/2011\/09\/raytracing-myths.html\">DEADC0DE<\/a> argues both will always have a place, and gives a deeper analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each (though the PITA that transparency causes rasterization is not called out) &#8211; I mostly agree with his stance. Both posts have lots of followup comments.<\/li>\n<li>This shows exactly how far behind we are in blogging about SIGGRAPH: find the Beyond Programmable Shading course notes <a href=\"http:\/\/bps11.idav.ucdavis.edu\/\">here<\/a> &#8211; that&#8217;s just a mere two months overdue.<\/li>\n<li>Tantalizing SIGGRAPH Talk demo: <a href=\"http:\/\/research.microsoft.com\/apps\/video\/default.aspx?id=152815\">KinectFusion<\/a> from Microsoft Research and many others. Watch around 3:11 on for the great reconstruction, and the last minute for fun stuff. Newer demo <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wnpUVa_eyCI&amp;feature=share\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.onlive.com\/\">OnLive<\/a> &#8211; you should check it out, it&#8217;ll take ten minutes. Sign up for a free account and visit the Arena, if nothing else: it&#8217;s like being in a sci-fi movie, with a bunch of games being played by others before your eyes that you can scroll through and click on to watch the player. I admit to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/all-the-pretty-clouds-floating-by\/\">being skeptical of the whole cloud-gaming idea originally<\/a>, but in trying it out, it&#8217;s surprisingly fast and the video quality is not bad. Not good enough to satisfy hardcore FPS players &#8211; I&#8217;ve seen my teenage boys pick out targets that cover like two pixels, which would be invisible with OnLive &#8211; but otherwise quite usable. The &#8220;no download, no GPU upgrade, just play immediately&#8221; aspect is brilliant and lends itself extremely well to game trials.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div id=\"attachment_2669\" style=\"width: 650px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/OnLiveSmall.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2669\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2669\" title=\"OnLive Arena\" src=\"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/OnLiveSmall.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/OnLiveSmall.jpg 640w, https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/OnLiveSmall-300x187.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-2669\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">OnLive Arena<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fairly new book: Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11, by Jason Zink, Matt Pettineo, and Jack Hoxley, A.K.Peters\/CRC Press, July 2011 (more info). It&#8217;s meant for people who already know DirectX 10 and want to learn just the new stuff. I found the first half pretty abstract; the second half was more useful, as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[16,250,489,491,139,55,490],"class_list":["post-2666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources","tag-books","tag-courses","tag-kinect","tag-moores-law","tag-onlive","tag-ray-tracing","tag-screen-capture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2666"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2689,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2666\/revisions\/2689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}