Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 141 — July 19, 2020


Optimizing Compute Shaders for L2 Locality using Thread-Group ID Swizzling

  • the article shows how to improve performance of fullscreen compute shader passes by tiling thread workloads to take advantage of memory locality
  • test cases show an example improvement of 1.47x on memory bound workloads


Art Tips from a Graphics Programmer 1, FRESNEL!

  • a twitter thread that visually explains what the Fresnel effect is and how it affects the appearance of different objects


Shadow Move Rendering in Killer Instinct: Season 3

  • the blog post presents how the shadow move technique was implemented in Killer Instinct: Season 3
  • the effect uses information from the previous frame in offscreen render targets combined with movement noise, flow maps, and trail renders attached to bones


Three key techniques for improving mobile game graphics using PVRTexTool

  • the blog post provides an overview of mipmapping, Colour Bleeding, and pre-multiplied alpha


Indexed Material Mapping Tecnique

  • the short blogpost shows an artists material setup that uses a small 16x16 LUT as indirection table into PBR materials


Technically Art: Issue 60 (17.07.2020)

  • collection of tweets related to VFX, shaders, and game art

GPU Memory Aliasing

  • the article discusses what memory aliasing exposed from Vulkan and D3D12 is and how it can be used to reduce memory usage
  • provides an example implementation of an algorithm that implements a resource aliasing allocator

[video] HPG 2020 - High-Performance Graphics (Day 1)

  • Towards Fully Ray-Traced Games: Addressing System-Level Challenges (Holger Gruen, Intel)
  • Generalized Light Portals
  • Efficient Adaptive Deferred Shading with Hardware Scatter Tiles
  • Post-Render Warp with Late Input Sampling Improves Aiming Under High Latency Conditions

[video] HPG 2020 - High-Performance Graphics (Day 2)

  • Neural Denoising for Path Tracing of Medical Volumetric Data
  • High-Performance Image Filters via Sparse Approximations
  • FLIP: A Difference Evaluator for Alternating Images
  • Evaluation of Graphics-based General Purpose Computation Solutions for Safety Critical Systems: An Avionics Case Study
  • Euclid NIR GPU: Embedded GPU-accelerated Near-Infrared Image Processing for On-board Space Systems.
  • Fast Eye-Adaptation for High Performance Mobile Applications. (Morteza Mostajab, Theodor Mader)


[video] HPG 2020 - High-Performance Graphics (Day 3)

  • Porting PBRT to the GPU While Preserving its Soul
  • Quadratic Approximation of Cubic Curves
  • Using Hardware Ray Transforms to Accelerate Ray/Primitive Intersections for Long, Thin Primitive Types
  • Sub-Triangle Opacity Masks for Faster Ray Tracing of Transparent Objects
  • Improved Triangle Encoding for Cached Adaptive Tessellation
  • Iterative GPU Occlusion Culling with BVH
  • Ray-casting inspired visualisation pipeline for multi-scale heterogeneous objects


NVIDIA Research: Warp Drive Gaming – Eliminate More than 80% of the Latency Performance Penalty

  • the paper presents a technique that uses late input latching and wrapping wrap render results to match camera rotations based on ideas from VR


Now You Can Choose High-Performing Unity Shaders

  • the article provides an overview of the performance that can be expected from several Unity Engine shaders
  • the provided information is from the Mali OpenGL ES shader compiler


An Exploration of GPU Silhouette Rendering

  • the article presents many techniques for rendering broad outlines for 3D objects
  • provides performance and quality comparisons of the different techniques
  • the final result is a flood fill based approach


[video] Unity: Make It Rain with Amplify Shader Editor

  • this Unity tutorial explains how to implement a rain effect on the surface of objects using a technique that is used on a tri-planar mapping
  • droplets on flat surfaces and streaks when angled
  • this is implemented using the Amplify Shader Editor


Thanks to Trevor Black for support of this series.


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