Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 167 — January 24, 2021


A Failed Adventure in Avoiding Temporal Anti-Aliasing

  • the author provides an overview of anti-aliasing solutions
  • what problems temporal techniques have, look at alternative solutions
  • and experience trying to avoid using temporal techniques in a game production


Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part II

  • the article discusses the progress on an open-source graphics stack for Apple M1
  • provides insights into how Apple GPU commands are expressed on the lowest level


[video] Beyond Emitters: Shader and Surface Driven GPU Particle FX Techniques

  • the video from GDC 2018 was released
  • the talk presents different iterations of a system to allow particles emission from everything in the world
  • contains many examples, pro/cons of several techniques
  • shows how to unfold meshes so that particles can be emitted in a view independent fashion
  • additionally provides insights into particle workflows


All the Pipelines - Journey through the GPU

  • the presentation provides an overview of the rendering pipeline from mesh creation to screen output
  • focuses on the RDNA2 architecture, presenting what each piece of hardware in the pipeline is called and the function it serves
  • providing insights into why specific workloads can achieve better performance than others


[video] Neon Noir – Raytracing on Mobile

  • talk provides an overview of the Crytek rendering pipeline
  • how a Micro-G buffer is used to reduce the bandwidth required
  • encoding, reconstruction errors, and performance comparison
  • how the raytracing is implemented using compute shaders
  • BVH data structures, using interlaced ray tracing for ray count reduction
  • data optimizations for BVH objects


OpenGL to Vulkan

  • the article explains the process of porting the NAP creative coding Framework to Vulkan
  • focuses on presenting the high-level concepts and considerations instead of API details
  • presents synchronization, main API objects, frame setup, descriptor set management, mesh and texture handling as well as coordinate space conversions


Organic Variety Making the Artificial Look Natural

  • the tutorial shows how to create procedural fractals
  • enable color and position modifications
  • present performance comparisons


Rendering dunes terrain in WebGL

  • the article presents how a sand dune wallpaper was implemented using WebGL
  • demonstrates how the scene was composed, dust particle implementation, wind simulation as well as texture
  • source code is available


[video] How to calculate Normal Vectors in Shader Graph

  • shows why normals need to be recalculated if a mesh shape is changed in a vertex shader
  • presents how to re-calculate the normals by applying the same offsets to approximate neighbors and recalculating the normal from this
  • simplified video version of How to Calculate Shader Graph Normals


Thanks to Vivitsu Maharaja for support of this series.


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