At the High Performance Graphics conference before the main show, keynote speeches from Larry Gritz of Sony Pictures Imageworks and Tim Sweeney of Epic Games showed that traditional 3D-rendering methods are being augmented and even supplanted by new techniques for motion-picture production as well as real-time computer games.
NeoAxis Engine 0.82
The next release of NeoAxis Engine, version 0.82 is a step to complete list of features. This version comes with some bug fixes, optimization, solving all Windows Vista troubles, support of new CG 2.2 and OGRE 1.6.3.
It also implements such necessary things as:
* orthographic projection camera support;
* GUI now shows correctly on widescreen monitors;
* binary packaging is now very easy;
* fixed pipeline blending supports all layers of Heightmap Terrain
We are happy to announce that we just released Irrlicht version 1.5.1. This version contains a lot of bugfixes and corrections, but also some few new features:
* Support for Range Fog in OpenGL
* Improved X11 support
* Better .x, STL and Collada file loading
* 32bit indices for large meshes
* Terrain rendering using hw buffers
* A lot of bug fixes and corrections
Features
* Live, realtime volumetric clouds
* Eye-wateringly fast!
* Physics-based cloud generation
* Multi-core calculation with Intel® Threading Building Blocks.
* Realtime weather-changes
* Time-of-day
* Atmospherics for distance fading
* Thunder and lightning
* Clouds you can fly through
* Simple C++ API
* Windows, console versions
* Renderer-independent
* Drop-in sample rendering source code and shaders for OpenGL, DirectX implementations
* Works with any 3D API or engine
* Built-in binary and XML load and save.
Epic Games recently announced that Intel Threading Building toolsets have become part of Epics integrated partners program for Unreal Engine 3 licensees. In other words, developers will no longer need to seek third-party resources when using the UE3 to gain access to multithreaded building tools.
GDC 2009: Windows 7 - What Does it Mean to Game Developers
This talk will summarize the new platform features, and detail the technical differences between Windows Vista and the upcoming new release.
GDC 2009: Get Ready for Windows 7
This presentation introduces Windows 7 and summarizes the key developer advances such as The New Taskbar and Shell Experience, Federated Search, Multi-touch Support, and Sensors and Location.
GDC 2009: Out of Order - Making In-Order Processors Play Nicely
This session illustrated the strategies you can employ to get great performance on in-order CPUs, including tackling load-hit-stores, L2 miss, branch mispredicts and expensive instructions.
GDC 2009: Direct3D11 Tessellation Deep Dive
This talk will summarize the design of the hull shader, tessellator, and domain shader pipeline stages, and outline their intended usage.
* Slides are now posted for James Fung's Advances in GPU-based Image Processing and Computer Vision
* Slides are now posted for Samuel Gateau's 3D Vision Technology - Develop, Design, Play in 3D Stereo
* Slides are now posted for Tianyun Ni's Course: Efficient Substitutes for Subdivision Surfaces
* Slides are now posted for Andrei Tatarinov and Alexander Kharlamov's Alternative Rendering Pipelines on NVIDIA CUDA
* Slides are now posted for Steve Parker and Phil Miller's Efficient Ray Tracing on NVIDIA GPUs (OptiX)
* Slides are now posted for Holger Kunz and Phil Miller's Accelerating Realism with the NVIDIA Scene Graph (SceniX)
Several new screenshots of stunning Rage environments were included in a SIGGRAPH 2009 talk given by id Software senior programmer J.M.P. van Waveren.
Consisting mainly of environment shots, the images show off id's "virtual texturing" process, which allows the studio to create "unique, very large" textures in the id Tech 5 engine. For the technically minded, notes on the talk are available in this PDF
v.0.72
-Updated to CUDA 2.3 - you'll probably have to update your drivers.
--Cuda 2.3 now supports multi-gpu with SLI enabled at the same time - no more twiddling settings!
-Fixed issue with frames becoming darker over the course of a long animation.
-Moved the flam3 XML loader to Flam4CudaX.dll, so it's now accessible to third parties.
v.0.71
-Added transparency option for PNG sequences.
-Fixed issue with the PNG sequence folder browser - you can now save to any folder, not just folders in My Pictures.
v.0.70
-Added support for rendering animations to PNG sequences.
GDC 2009: The Beauty of Destruction
This presentation will cover all aspects of C++ object destruction, ranging from destructor performance to best practices.
GDC 2009: Lockless Programming
This talk will explain the problems with locks and how lockless programming can avoid those limitations. It will then cover some of the challenges with lockless programming and how to manage them.
GDC 2009: NetGrove - New Tools for Network Optimization
The talk will provide demonstrations of a number of NetGrove’s features that build on the packet sniffing capabilities of NetMon 3.1 as well as provide easy-to-adopt techniques for tuning games to typical bandwidths and latencies.
GDC 2009: Direct3D11 Multithreaded Rendering and Compute
This talk will discuss the changes made to the Direct3D11 API that enable resource management and rendering work to be submitted across multiple CPU threads.
What’s New in v2.0-beta2
* First public beta release of ATI Stream SDK with OpenCL™ CPU support.
* The OpenCL™ 1.0 conformance logs from this release have been submitted to the Khronos OpenCL™ Working Group.
* Several bug fixes and optimizations.
* Brook+ is now available on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/brookplus
We recently had the opportunity to speak with Neil Trevett, who fills positions as both the Khronos Group's President and Nvidia's VP of Embedded Content. Consumers might not hear the Khronos name too often, but the organization is responsible for setting and updating a number of key standards: among them OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and most recently, OpenCL.
In the fifth issue of Intel® Visual Adrenaline magazine we feature how Dreamworks Animation is configuring their animation pipeline; how Justin Lassen and a collaborative set of CG artists are creating a new art form; how HDFilm’s Chadam is opening the way for game engines; and how Intel is expanding our support of CG artists through the new Artist and Animator Resources Center.
When discussing things to do and see at SIGGRAPH, it is important to note the co-located conferences. This year, SIGGRAPH is co-located with the Eurographics Symposium on Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling (SBIM), the Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (NPAR), and High-Performance Graphics (HPG). SCA has had good animation papers over the years, and is of interest to many game graphics programmers. NPAR is also a good conference for anyone interested in stylized rendering. In this post I will focus on HPG, which is a new conference formed out of the merger of the venerable Graphics Hardware conference, and the newcomer Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing.
NVIDIA, the leader in GPU computing, today introduced the NVIDIA® OptiX™ ray tracing engine, part of a suite of application acceleration engines for software developers. NVIDIA acceleration engines make it easy to incorporate valuable, high-performance capabilities into applications, while simultaneously reducing development time.
NVIDIA application acceleration engines unveiled at Siggraph 2009 include:
* NVIDIA® OptiX™ engine for real-time ray tracing
* NVIDIA® SceniX™ engine for managing 3D data and scenes
* NVIDIA® CompleX™ engine for scaling performance across multiple GPUs
* NVIDIA® PhysX® 64-bit engine for real-time, hyper-realistic physical and environmental effects
AMD just published its public OpenCL Beta for the CPU, soon to be followed with support for AMD’s latest GPUs. OpenCL is a young technology, and, while a specification has been published (www.khronos.org/registry/opencl/), there are currently few documents that provide a basic introduction with examples. This article helps make OpenCL easier to understand and implement.
This post addresses some of the issues with texture and 2D/3D array address mappings when mixing compute and fixed function as well as dealing with cache lines and the higher granularity of global memory access of GPUs.
For those developers moving on to compute (CUDA, OpenCL, DX11 CS4/CS5), this is going to be an important thing to have a full understanding of!
This driver supports all of OpenGL 3.2 and GLSL 1.50, except for the following:
* Geometry shaders as part of the core. You can use the ARB_geometry_shader extension instead
* glXCreateContextAttribsARB() does not yet support the GLX_CONTEXT_PROFILE_MASK_ARB attribute value. In order to create a Core profile context, call glXCreateContextAttribsARB(), request OpenGL 3.2 as the version, and leave the GLX_CONTEXT_PROFILE_MASK_ARB attribute out. In order to create an OpenGL 3.2 Compatibility profile context, call the "old" glXCreateContext() entrypoint. Note: wglCreateContextAttribsARB() does support WGL_CONTEXT_PROFILE_MASK_ARB.
This driver exposes the following new extensions:
For OpenGL 2.1 capable hardware:
* ARB_fragment_coord_conventions
* ARB_provoking_vertex
* ARB_vertex_array_bgra
* ARB_depth_clamp
For OpenGL 3 capable hardware:
* WGL_ARB_create_context (updated to create profiles)
* GLX_ARB_create_context (updated to create profiles)
* GL_EXT_separate_shader_objects
* GL_NV_parameter_buffer_object2
* GL_NV_copy_image.txt
