Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 127 — April 12, 2020


Evolving Path of Exile's Renderer

  • the talk presents an overview of rendering features developed for Path of Exile
  • showing what constraints the game provides and how it enables these implementations
  • Point Light Shadows (Screenspace Hierarchical Variance shadow maps)
  • Screenspace Global Illumination
  • Subsurface refraction, a technique used for ice and water
  • Water flow map generation on the CPU using Algebraic Multigrid
  • grass and fur using pre-calculated raytracing
  • an extensive collection of brief overviews of other techniques such as burning, fracturing, scalar field vectorization


Virtual machine for executing SPIR-V

  • A virtual machine that is written in C enables executing of a subset of SPIR-V shaders (only 2D texture operations, no 3D etc.)


Speeding Up Lighthouse 2

  • presents operations that reduced the shading time required from 21.58ms to 13.52ms
  • combination of scene-specific adjustments, implementation changes to noise generation and variance reduction


Artists’ best practices for mobile game development

  • A guide aimed at technical artists to preset best practices for geometry, texture, material and shader optimizations for mobile devices


Optimizing Trilinear Interpolation

  • the article presents implementations optimizations to speedup trilinear filtering
  • taking advantage of the representation of power floating-point number to speed up operations


Updated Article Database Design

  • The database of articles included in this series has been updated with a new look
  • this is the first step of a more extensive upgrade, and new functionality will be added soon. Stay tuned


Thanks to Max R.R. Collada for support of this series.


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