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3D-Tech News Around The Web / Some thoughts about the Vulkan API (glNext) and the future of OpenGL

« Last post by JeGX on March 03, 2015, 02:52:01 PM »

As there is no compatibility between OpenGL and the Vulkan API, many large GL code bases will not switch immediately. But older applications will still want to access new hardware features, so I believe that OpenGL is not dead yet, but will in fact live on for some more versions. I’m confident that we will see new hardware features exposed in OpenGL 5.0 (maybe at Siggraph this year?). Just as NVIDIA, AMD and Intel didn’t drop the Compatibility profile even in the latest OpenGL versions, I don’t expect them to drop support for new OpenGL versions any time soon. I guess it’s actually more likely that we will quite some OpenGL extensions which expose more Vulkan like features in OpenGL to help transitioning (e.g. the Vulkan shader “binaries” SPIR-V). Limited compatibility in the other direction at least for the shaders is planned by providing a GLSL to SPIR-V compiler.

Full story: http://renderingpipeline.com/2015/03/some-thoughts-about-the-vulkan-api-glnext-and-the-future-of-opengl/

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3D-Tech News Around The Web / Trying out the new Vulkan graphics API on PowerVR GPUs

« Last post by JeGX on March 03, 2015, 02:46:09 PM »

Imagination is a promoting member of the Khronos Group and has been working on developing a proof-of-concept driver for Vulkan for our PowerVR Rogue GPUs. Our PowerVR demo team has also spent the last two months porting one of our new OpenGL ES 3.0 demos to the new API and today we are able to show you a snapshot of our work.

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For example, there are no glUniform*() equivalent entry points in Vulkan; instead, writing to GPU memory is the only way to pass data to shaders.

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Command buffers can be created on a different thread to the thread they are submitted on. This means rendering commands could be created on all cores of a CPU.

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When you call glTexStorage2D() in OpenGL, the driver has to allocate memory for a two-dimensional or one-dimensional array texture. The function and the memory allocation process represent a black box.

In Vulkan however, the memory allocation is done by the application. This means that the application knows more about what type of memory it is using and more importantly how much memory it is using, which should be useful for applications that are memory-bound.

- Complete story: http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/trying-out-the-new-vulkan-graphics-api-on-powervr-gpus
- Library demo with Vulkan drivers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnRI0nquKc

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3D-Tech News Around The Web / SPIR-V Whitepaper

« Last post by JeGX on March 03, 2015, 11:27:14 AM »

SPIR-V is a new platform-independent intermediate language. It is a self-contained, fully specified, binary format
for representing graphical-shader stages and compute kernels for multiple APIs. Physically, it is a stream of 32-bit words. Logically, it is a header and a linear stream of instructions. These encode, first, a set of annotations and decorations, and second a collection of functions. Each function encodes a control-flow graph (CFG) of basic blocks, with additional instructions to preserve source-code structured flow control. Load/store instructions are used to access declared variables, which includes all input/output (IO). Intermediate results bypassing load/store use single static-assignment (SSA) representation. Data objects are represented logically, with hierarchical type information: There is no flattening of aggregates or assignment to physical register banks, etc. Selectable addressing models establish whether general pointers may be used, or if memory access is purely logical.

Link: https://www.khronos.org/registry/spir-v/papers/WhitePaper.pdf

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3D-Tech News Around The Web / On APIs and the future of Mantle

« Last post by JeGX on March 02, 2015, 10:05:29 PM »

AMD is a company that fundamentally believes in technologies unfettered by restrictive contracts, licensing fees, vendor lock-ins or other arbitrary hurdles to solving the big challenges in graphics and computing. Mantle was destined to follow suit, and it does so today as we proudly announce that the 450-page programming guide and API reference for Mantle will be available this month (March, 2015) at www.amd.com/mantle

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Mantle’s definition of “open” must widen. It already has, in fact. This vital effort has replaced our intention to release a public Mantle SDK, and you will learn the facts on Thursday, March 5 at GDC 2015.

Link: http://community.amd.com/community/amd-blogs/amd-gaming/blog/2015/03/02/on-apis-and-the-future-of-mantle

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3D-Tech News Around The Web / Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

« Last post by JeGX on March 02, 2015, 06:10:50 PM »

Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free, and all future updates will be free!

You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. It’s a simple arrangement in which we succeed only when you succeed.

This is the complete technology we use at Epic when building our own games. It scales from indie projects to high-end blockbusters; it supports all the major platforms; and it includes 100% of the C++ source code. Our goal is to give you absolutely everything, so that you can do anything and be in control of your schedule and your destiny. Whatever you require to build and ship your game, you can find it in UE4, source it in the Marketplace, or build it yourself – and then share it with others.

Link: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

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3D-Tech News Around The Web / Sony Woos Game Makers to Ensure Demand for Virtual Reality Gear

« Last post by JeGX on March 02, 2015, 05:33:59 PM »

Companies from Facebook Inc. to Sony Corp. and Google Inc. have spent billions of dollars investing in virtual-reality technology.

Now they have to turn it into a business. To get consumers to buy their devices, Sony, Facebook’s Oculus VR, Valve Corp. and Razer USA Ltd. need games to play and videos to watch. At this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, they’ll be trying to convince software makers there’s a market to be had.

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“The market for virtual reality is very hot right now, and a lot of highly visible developers, designers and investors are placing bets,” van Dreunen said. “However, in the absence of solid delivery dates from the leading companies in the space, it is clear that virtual reality is not yet ready for prime time.”

Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-02/sony-woos-game-makers-to-ensure-demand-for-virtual-reality-gear

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3D-Tech News Around The Web / (WebGL) Tesserace 3D Path Tracing Test

« Last post by JeGX on March 02, 2015, 01:29:44 PM »

Rays are fired from the camera out into the scene, bounce around according to physical models, and record when they hit a light source. Whenever anything changes, the scene has to be re-traced (it starts out noisy, but converges to the correct image).

Links:
- https://github.com/jonathanolson/tesserace
- http://jonathan-olson.com/tesserace/tests/3d.html

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3D-Tech News Around The Web / Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links

« Last post by JeGX on March 02, 2015, 01:14:52 PM »

Google's search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page.

link: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530102.600-google-wants-to-rank-websites-based-on-facts-not-links.html

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English forum / Re: Could not connect to server (04)

« Last post by janixpl on February 28, 2015, 12:13:23 AM »

Thank you very much.

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3D-Tech News Around The Web / The reasons why programmers don't blog

« Last post by JeGX on February 27, 2015, 12:44:31 PM »

Here’s a short summary of the reasons:

-    Time
-    “What I do is not interesting to others”
-    Perfectionism
-    Coding is better than writing
-    I’m not doing anything innovative
-    “I don’t do side projects”
-    “I don’t know what to write about”
-    shame
-    “what I want to write about is too obvious”
-    writing is harder than coding
-    everyone knows that already
-    longer feedback loop, as compared to coding

Full story: http://blog.arkency.com/2015/02/the-reasons-why-programmers-dont-blog/