Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 126 — April 5, 2020


NVIDIA Vulkan Ray Tracing Tutorials

  • collection of Vulkan tutorials for the VK_KHR_ray_tracing extension
  • the tutorial starts from a working .obj rendering using rasterization and then integrates raytracing
  • additional topics covered are Anti-Aliasing, handling thousands of Objects, Transparency, Reflections, Animation, Callable Shader and Ray Query


Using Nsight Systems for Fixing Stutters in Games

  • the article shows how Nsight was used for debugging a frame stutter bug in the Vulkan raytracing implementation of Wolfenstein: Youngblood


Optimizing VK/VKR and DX12/DXR Applications Using Nsight Graphics: GPU Trace Advanced Mode Metrics

  • the post presents how to use Nsight to apply the Peak-Performance method to determine a performance problem in Wolfenstein: Youngblood (Vulkan)
  • shows how to detect being memory-bound and how to reduce the texture memory being access in a hit shader


Paper Burn Shader in Unity

  • this Unity tutorial explains how to implement a burning effect for paper
  • this tutorial builds on previous parts of the series


Intro to gfx-hal • Part 1: Drawing a triangle

  • part 1 of rust graphics programming series using the rust gfx hal
  • gfx-hal is a graphics abstraction layer on top of D3D12, Vulkan and metal
  • this in-depth tutorial covers everything required from the setup of the application, window, shader, etc. needed to render the first triangle into a window


Intro to gfx-hal • Part 2: Push constants

  • the second part of the tutorial series extends the example so that Vulkan push constants can be used to render multiple triangles with varying settings
  • settings that can be modified include color, position, and scale


physical lighting quantities: tying both ends

  • the article presents a method that allows validation of a physical camera model against ground truth data


Seven Things for March 31, 2020

  • collection of links and graphics community news such as ACM Digitial library being free, I3D posponed, …

Biquadratic interpolation with independent sample weights

  • the article shows how to use quadratic interpolation for depth aware upsampling
  • the presented use-case presented is volumetric clouds


GTC 2020: DLSS - Image Reconstruction for Real-time Rendering with Deep Learning

  • the GTC talks provide an overview of Deep Learning Super Sampling
  • presents an overview of the challenges for upscaling the results of realtime rendering
  • shows a history of existing techniques and compares the qualities of different methods
  • includes a section on how to integrate the technique into Unreal Engine 4


Terrain and Mesh Blending in Unity

  • his Unity tutorial shows one way of blending meshes that are close to the terrain with the terrain colors
  • the presented approach uses a separate depth texture to record the terrain depth and uses this to calculate the distance of a pixel to the terrain


Unmasking the Arkham Knight

  • the article presents a breakdown of the rendering stages found in the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight
  • the game uses a hybrid approach between forward and deferred rendering based on the distance to the camera
  • lighting is done in a computer shader using checkerboard pattern with upscaling
  • rain is using GPU based particles


GTC 2020: RTXGI: Scalable Ray Traced Global Illumination in Real Time

  • the GTC presentation explains how the technique aims to replace existing indirect lighting techniques
  • provides an overview of how the method combines ray tracing, fast irradiance updates, and a moment-based depth scheme to enable realtime GI without baking information offline


ACM TechTalk - Ed Catmull & Richard Chuang

  • ACM tech talk with Ed Catmull & Richard Chuang happening on Tuesday, April 14


An Efficient Transport Estimator for Complex Layered Materials

  • the paper presents a new technique to speed up the rendering of complex, layered materials
  • the model doesn’t rely on any precomputation


A new method to construct isotropic blue-noise point sets with uniform projections

  • the article presents a method for direct construction of tileable isotropic blue noise
  • the technique is based on improved Correlated Shuffling


a little thread on a neat way to interpolate across a triangle!

  • A twitter thread that explains what barycentric coordinates are and how they are commonly used in computer graphics to interpolate data
  • provides animated graphics to explain the concepts more visually


Thanks to Sean McAlliste for support of this series.


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