Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 125 — March 29, 2020


Hierarchical Depth Buffers

  • the article presents what Hierarchical depth buffers are, what they are used for and how to generate them
  • two different techniques for calculating these buffers are presented
  • one pixel shader based method and a compute shader variation
  • the compute shader variation is designed to only generate a single MIP level, not a full MIP chain
  • presents a performance comparison between the two techniques


[Video] Commandos Cone of Sight FX in Unity | GPUMAN

  • the Unity tutorial explains how to implement a cone of sight that is occluded by objects
  • intersection with the primary scene depth buffer allows constraining the effect to the surface of the terrain
  • a secondary “shadow map” from the position of the player is used to detect occlusion in the cone


Links to GDC 2020 Talks and More

  • collection of link resources from GDC, GTC
  • additional resources from Google, Intel, Ubisoft and Khronos


PIX 2003.26 – DirectX 12 Ultimate and DXIL debugging

  • new Pix for Windows release with support for DXR 1.1, Mesh shaders and sampler feedback
  • also includes updated timeline news with the correlation between CPU and GPU work
  • additionally adds support for DXIL source-level debugging


NVIDIA Announces Nsight Graphics 2020.2

  • GPU Trace and Nsight Aftermath now supports Vulkan
  • Advanced mode for GPU Trace collects more in-depth information over several continues frames


Augmenting shader languages for modern rendering APIs

  • the author presents his domain-specific language and how it’s used to extend shaders
  • allows all state required for pipeline objects to be encoded as part of the shader code


Vulkan Mobile Best Practices - Management of Command Buffers and Multi-Threaded Recording

  • the article presents best practices for multithreaded command recording with Vulkan
  • show performance comparisons of different methods and discusses common mistakes


WebGL best practices

  • the article contains many best practices for WebGL applications
  • discussing a large number of topics including memory estimation, performance guidelines, GLSL tips, texture performance, and constraints
  • additionally covers some WebGL 2.0 and Canvas related advice


Introducing OpenCL™ and OpenGL® on DirectX

  • Microsoft and Collabora are working together to implement an OpenCL and OpenGL layer for Mesa that is running on D3D12
  • provides a summary of what Mesa 3D is and why API translation is important
  • also provides an overview of the implementation


Multi-Adapter with Integrated and Discrete GPUs

  • presentation from Intel that presents how to use multiple adapters with D3D12
  • techniques for work-sharing and dealing with synchronization
  • offers performance numbers for the presented methods, best practices, and possible problems


Variable Rate Shading Tier 1 with Microsoft DirectX* 12 from Theory to Practice

  • the presentation provides an overview of Variable Rate Shading (VRS), explaining what shading and rasterization rate are
  • shows what settings implicitly disable VRS on Tier 1 intel hardware
  • presents how VRS is integrated into Unreal Engine 4, Chivalry II
  • gives performance and quality examples for both


RTX Global Illumination SDK Now Available

  • Nvidia released the RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI) SDK v1.0
  • SDK provides a framework for realtime GI for games, it offers full source code
  • post contains a video overview of the techniques from GDC 2019


Announcing the NVIDIA Texture Tools Exporter 2020.1

  • Nvidia released a new version of the DDS exporter
  • improved mathematically correct filtering for mipmap generation adjusted to the content of the image
  • support for high-quality BC7 and HDR formats


Thanks to Graham Wihlidal for support of this series.


Would you like to see your name here too? Become a Patreon of this series.