- introduces spherical harmonics as an orthonormal basis for approximating functions defined on a sphere, with a focus on lighting applications
- walks through the mathematical foundations with interactive in-browser examples for cubemap projection
- covers practical pitfalls
- proposes a neural extension of the six-way lightmaps technique to render participating media such as smoke in real time
- generates a guiding map from the camera view via ray marching with a coarse sampling step to capture scattering and silhouette, then uses a neural network to predict the corresponding six lightmaps
- open-source companion code for the “Real-Time Neural Network Implementation for GPUs” chapter in the GPU Zen 4 book
- implements multi-layer perceptron (MLP) training and inference in DirectX 12 and HLSL
- presented example learns how to reconstruct an image
- introduces MiniDXNN, an open-source multi-layer perceptron (MLP) inference library implemented natively in HLSL
- leverages cooperative vector APIs to utilize AMD Radeon GPU matrix cores
- targets performance comparable to dedicated ML frameworks
- The initial release ships with optimized inference kernels and 2D image reconstruction samples
- upgrades the color LUT in a Unity Custom SRP from a simulated 2D texture strip to a native 3D texture
- replaces the fragment-shader-based LUT generation with a compute shader that writes directly into the 3D texture
- presents how to write a debug visualizer for 3D LUTs
- describes a workaround for Metal’s lack of resource casting by aliasing a buffer and a compressed texture on the same Metal heap allocation, allowing compute shaders to write BC7 blocks directly
- the encoder must produce blocks in the GPU’s native swizzle order within 32×32 block macro-tiles
- Benchmarks shows that the approach is around 20% faster than the conventional path
- introduces Vulkan specialization constants as a mechanism to set compile-time constant values in GLSL shaders at pipeline creation
- explains the Vulkan API structs involved
- walks through a practical example integrating specialization constants into an existing shader
- Implements a Phong-based URP HLSL lighting model
- Covers URP shader variants for shadows and normal maps
- Adds point lights and a shadow mask from dynamic lightmap UVs
- in-depth frame analysis of PRAGMATA, a new Capcom IP built on RE Engine
- walks through the full render pipeline, including Z-prepass, deferred G-buffer with visibility buffer, compute-based SSAO, shadow maps, deferred lighting, ray-traced reflections, strand-based hair simulation and rendering, and the post-process stack
- explains Teardown’s unconventional voxel renderer
- rasterizes object bounding boxes and runs DDA-based traversal in the fragment shader
- covers the approach to soft shadows and its limitations that motivated a next-generation rewrite
- presents the Vulkan hardware raytracing successor to overcome quality limitations
- covers distinct media types found in Enshrouded
- based on sparse virtual-texture voxel with BC-compressed 16³ tiles, top-down weather fog, VFX-spawned dynamic volumes, a 2D cloud density map, and water stored as a sparse signed distance field
- presents how to combine the various sources to create the effects
- introduces the Intel PIX metrics experience for Xe GPUs
- covering how to use pipeline counters to identify bottlenecks such as excess vertex fetching and high clipper rejection in shadow passes
- explains the Xe GPU architecture
- walks through all major hardware stall reasons, from message FIFO full, instruction fetch, jump dependency, ALU write, and much more
Thanks to Stephen Hill for support of this series.
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