Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 16 โ€” November 12, 2017


Announcing new DirectX 12 features [wayback-archive]

  • support for GPU heaps that persist a device removal MSDN

  • allow writing of U32 values directly from withing command lists MSDN

  • Depth Bounds Testing support MSDN

  • Programmable MSAA MSDN


World of Tanks: Graphical Update Technical Overview [wayback-archive]

  • Stochastic Flakes for rough materials (snow, dust, sand)
  • spherical harmonics grid for Global Illumination
    • height deviation on terrain/objects to optimize probe placement
  • breakdown of water system
  • deformation particles
    • allow geometry to be deformed
    • bent grass, water deformation, shockwaves
  • terrain system
  • vegetation system

Precomputed Atmospheric Scattering:a New Implementation [wayback-archive]

  • new OpenGL implementation of bruneton scattering model
  • a lot more documentation and implementation descriptions
  • new features
    • ozone layer
    • support for extra-terrestrial solar spectrum
    • density profiles for air molecules and aerosols

Deringing Spherical Harmonics [wayback-archive]

  • removing ringing artifacts using windowing functions (function that is zero-valued outside of some chosen interval)
  • how to determine how much windowing to apply

GPU-based particle simulation [wayback-archive]

  • D3D11 based
  • implementation overview
    • code is accessible on github

Upscaling half resolution screen space effects [wayback-archive]

  • render diffuse at half-resolution
  • generate “retouching” vector field
    • used during upscaling
    • information where to fetch samples

Amplify Shader Editor - Rendering Shaders Overview [wayback-archive]

  • series of short beginner level videos about
    • shaders
    • physically based rendering
    • 3d models
    • materials
    • textures

Multi-core programming and cache coherency

  • talks about how caches are working on a hardware level
    • cache protocol
    • memory barriers

Parallelizing the Gauss-Seidel Method using Graph Coloring [wayback-archive]

  • detect partition of variables that can be solved indepedently
    • variables within one parition can be solved in parrallel
    • detect partitions with graph coloring
  • sparse matrices result in low number of partitions
    • common in game use cases

Alloy - Open source

  • Physical Shader Framework for unity, now open source

SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 โ€“ Technical Papers Trailer