Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 165 — January 10, 2021


Rendering a Sphere on a Quad

  • the article explains in detail how to render a raytraced sphere that interacts with other parts of the Unity rendering pipeline
  • covers how to use a billboard to render there sphere, explaining how to calculate an optimal camera facing quad and texture mapping
  • extending to support shadow casting, receiving, and use of conservative depth output to enable early depth rejection


Intro to Shaders

  • beginner-focused tutorial that explains how 3D data is structured in computer graphics
  • covers what shaders are, what type exists, and how they are used within Unity to define the look


[video] Christmas special, making it snow.

  • the video tutorial explains how to create interactive snow on terrain and objects using Godot
  • interactive snow is implemented via a snow mask that is updated and blends between textures and modifies vertex positions
  • snow on objects is world space projected snow textures that also is interactive


A Diligent Approach to Ray Tracing

  • the article presents a walkthrough of a RayTracing abstraction layer that was implemented for D3D12 and Vulkan
  • provides a walkthrough of how to combine the elements to a example scene
  • shows what the different raytracing shaders are and what they contribute to the final image


Radeon™ GPU Profiler 1.9 introduces support for Radeon™ RX 6000 Series

  • the updated tool allows an in-depth view into the raytracing details on AMD hardware
  • reveals that the driver might inline all shaders into a single shader or keep shaders separate
  • the new update provides a shader table view to see the relative cost of different stages
  • additional shows all shaders with costs, call count, and ability to see ISA


[video] CUDA Memory Model

  • the video explains the CUDA memory model
  • covering the rules of how memory operations on shared memory from multiple threads are processed
  • looking at loading, reordering, barriers, etc.. and explains with examples (source code published)


ShaderQuest Part 0: Series Introduction

  • Overview for the start of a new shader tutorial series for beginners
  • starts by providing the motivation, approach, and topics that will be covered


Ditherpunk — The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering

  • the article focuses on providing a walkthrough of dithering techniques
  • provides an overview of what dithering is, use cases
  • showcase of different dithering patterns and what results they produce


CVTT Texture Compressor Technical Breakdown

  • the article provides an overview of the CVTT compression techniques used (DirecXTex fork aims to be an experiment to improve state of the art)
  • shows how the different formats are compressed, common themes across formats, and lists possible improvements


Thanks to Michael Hazani for support of this series.


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