Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 80 — April 14, 2019


Debugging VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST with Nvidia Device Diagnostics

  • vulkan extension that allows progress markers to be inserted into the Vulkan command stream
  • these can be used to detect the range of draw commands that have caused a GPU device error
  • a short overview of how it is used in X-Plane


GPU Architectures

  • a brief overview of the rasterization process
  • look at the logical rendering pipeline model
  • presents the different components that are used to implement pipeline in hardware
  • implementation details about the different stages


RTG free on Kindle; consider Google Play for books

  • Ray Tracing Gems is now also available as a free Kindle version


Observations about the rendering of Metro: Exodus

  • presents an overview of the general flow of a frame of the game
  • a more detailed look at the acceleration structures used for the raytraced GI implementation


More observations in Metro: Exodus

  • looks at the composition of transparent objects, lens flares and at terrain tessellation
  • presents more images from the acceleration structures and problems discovered with it


DirectX-Specs

  • Microsoft released the engineering specification for Direct3D 11 and 12 including DXR


GDC19 show guide from NVIDIA

  • all GDC content from Nvidia is now available for download (free login required)


AMD GCN ISA: a first dive

  • shows which tools are available to look at the shader disassembly for AMD GPUs
  • presents the instructions generated for a simple shader and overview of some of the instructions used
  • shows the effect of code changes to the code generation


high-quality object-space dynamic ambient occlusion for characters

  • preprint of I3D paper that will be presented in May
  • AO calculations are split into large-scale interactions based on sphere approximations
  • finer details are created using linear interpolation from key points on the spheres
  • both components are trained against ground truth data


[pdf] - nvidia vulkan update - GTC 2019

  • overview of the latest extensions added to Vulkan on Nvidia GPUs
  • mesh shader motivation, execution model and how to use them
  • barycentric coordinates extension
  • subgroup overview and tensor core access
  • texture space shading
  • derivatives in compute shaders


A tour of Granite’s Vulkan backend – Part 1

  • discusses the authors’ thoughts about abstraction levels in graphics APIs
  • presents the motivation for the design of the granite engine API


Thanks to Cort Stratton for support of this series.


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