This web site, maintained by Jan Vlietinck, provides sample programs with full source code written for DirectCompute Shaders. Examples include interactive 3D Navier-Stokes and Laplace wave equation solvers and fractal renderers.  The Laplace simulator runs at interactive rates for a 400×400x400 volume, and the Navier-Stokes solver at 200×200x200, including visualization.

The course notes and supplementary material for “Beyond Programmable Shading”, a full-day course held at SIGGRAPH 2009 on August 6, are now available online.

This course is presented in two parts, Beyond Programmable Shading I and Beyond Programmable Shading II.

There are strong indications that the future of interactive graphics programming is a more flexible model than today’s OpenGL/Direct3D pipelines. Graphics developers need a basic understanding of how to combine emerging parallel programming techniques and more flexible graphics processors with the traditional interactive rendering pipeline. The first half of the course introduces the trends and directions in this emerging field. Topics include: parallel graphics architectures, parallel programming models for graphics, and game-developer investigations of the use of these new capabilities in future rendering engines.

The second half of the course has leaders from graphics hardware vendors, game development, and academic research present case studies that show how general parallel computation is being combined with the traditional graphics pipeline to boost image quality and spur new graphics algorithm innovation. Each case study discusses the mix of parallel programming constructs used, details of the graphics algorithm, and how the rendering pipeline and computation interact to achieve the technical goals. Read the rest of this entry »

The new High-Performance Graphics Conference is the synthesis of two highly-successful conference series:

• Graphics Hardware, an annual conference focusing on graphics hardware, architecture, and systems since 1986, and
• Interactive Ray Tracing, an innovative conference series focusing on the emerging field of interactive ray tracing since 2006.

By combining these two conferences, High-Performance Graphics aims to bring to authors and attendees the best of both, while extending the scope of the new conference to cover the overarching field of performance-oriented graphics systems covering innovative algorithms, efficient implementations, and hardware architecture. This broader focus offers a common forum bringing together researchers, engineers, and architects to discuss the complex interactions of massively parallel hardware, novel programming models, efficient graphics algorithms, and innovative applications.

Paper submissions are due April 30th.  For more information see the High-Performance Graphics Website.

Faogen ia a Fast Ambient Occlusion Generator. It uses a GPU to accelerate computation of ambient occlusion and bent normals both as per-vertex data and in texture images. Faogen 2.0 provides updated ambient aperture and bent normal shaders customizable by editing two simple GLSL functions. Other features include improved precision on large scale models, adjustable background for AO texture images, lighting animation control and bugfixes. (Faogen)

This paper by Boubekeur (TU Berlin) and Schlick (INRIA) presents a flexible GPU kernel for adaptive on-the-fly refinement of meshes with arbitrary topology. By simply reserving a small amount of GPU memory to store a set of adaptive refinement patterns, on-the-fly refinement is performed by the GPU, without any preprocessing or additional topology data structure. The level of adaptive refinement can be controlled by specifying a per-vertex depth tag, in addition to usual position, normal, color and texture coordinates. This depth tag is used by the kernel to instanciate the correct refinement pattern. Finally, the refined patch produced for each triangle can be displaced by the vertex shader, using any kind of geometric refinement, such as Bezier patch smoothing, scalar valued displacement, procedural geometry synthesis or subdivision surfaces. This refinement engine requires no multi-pass rendering, fragment processing, or special preprocessing of the input mesh structure. It can be implemented on any GPU with vertex shading capabilities. (A Flexible Kernel for Adaptive Mesh Refinement on GPU, Tamy Boubekeur and Christophe Schlick, Computer Graphics Forum, 2008.)

GPU Gems 3, the third volume of the best-selling GPU Gems series provides a snapshot of today’s latest Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) programming techniques. The programmability of modern GPUs allows developers to not only distinguish themselves from one another but also to use this awesome processing power for non-graphics applications, such as physics simulation, financial analysis, and even virus detection—particularly with the CUDA architecture. Graphics remains the leading application for GPUs, and readers will find that the latest algorithms create ultra-realistic characters, better lighting, and post-rendering compositing effects. This third volume is certain to appeal to not just the many fans of the first two, but a whole new group of programmers as well. (GPU Gems 3 Page at Addison-Wesley)

I3D 2008 (aka the Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games) will be happening the weekend before GDC this year, February 15-17, in nearby Redwood City, CA. The Call For Participation is now up at the website: October 22 is this year’s paper deadline. This is a small conference, 100 attendees or so, that offers a good opportunity to meet other people working on GPU related techniques. I3D 2007 included a number of GPGPU-related papers on interactive ray tracing, mesh simplification, and histogram generation; see Ke-Sen Huang’s summary page. (CFP I3D 2008 page)

This paper by Robert et al. at the University of Bern, Switzerland describes the object intersection buffer (OIB), a GPU-based visibility preprocessing algorithm for accelerating ray tracing. Based on this approach, a hybrid ray tracer is proposed to exploit parallel ray tracing using the GPU and CPU. (Hybrid Ray Tracing – Ray Tracing Using GPU-Accelerated Image-Space Methods. Philippe C.D. Robert, Severin Schoepke, and Hanspeter Bieri. Proceedings of GRAPP 2007.)

Neoptica has recently posted a whitepaper, “Programmable Graphics—The Future of Interactive Rendering.” It introduces the coming era of programmable graphics, in which developers implement rendering algorithms using combinations of parallel CPU and GPU tasks executing cooperatively on heterogeneous multi-core architectures of the near future. By embracing both task- and data-parallel computation, this approach frees developers to use the most efficient parallel computation style for their algorithms, and makes it possible to define custom graphics pipelines built using complex algorithms and dynamic data structures. The paper argues that future graphics applications that leverage the tightly coupled capabilities of forthcoming CPUs and GPUs will generate far richer and more realistic imagery, use computational resources more efficiently, and scale to large numbers of CPU and GPU cores.

This paper by Savage, Searle and McCalman describes a program which uses the built in support for 4-vector/matrix operations on a programmable GPU to perform Lorentz transformations on relativistic 4-momentum vectors in real time. This allows a pixel shader to render relativistic effects such as Geometric Aberration, Doppler shift and the Headlight effect in response to user’s interaction. A program, “Real-Time Relativity”, has been written to demonstrate these effects. (Real-Time Relativity. C. M. Savage, A. C. Searle, L. McCalman. Physics ArXiv)