The free talks from GDC events all the way back to 1996.
Jun 252011
A Siggraph 2010 course
“There are strong indications that the future of interactive graphics programming is a model more flexible than today’s OpenGL/Direct3D pipelines. As such, graphics developers need to have a basic understanding of how to combine emerging parallel programming techniques and more flexible graphics processors with the traditional interactive rendering pipeline. The first half of the course introduces attendees to modern parallel graphics architectures and parallel programming models, and describes current and near-term use of these new capabilities for real-time rendering. The second half of the course looks farther ahead at trends emerging in the academic literature and offline rendering communities as researchers use these many-core parallel architectures to explore future rendering pipelines. Topics include future, and more flexible, rendering pipelines that support true motion blur, depth-of-field, curved surfaces, and complex dynamic lighting. The course concludes with a panel, moderated by the creator of OpenGL Kurt Akeley, on the role of fixed function hardware in future graphics architectures.”
Slides available in here.
The blog Lost in the Triangles has an interesting article on appropriate texture dimensions. The discussion that follows is also worth reading.
Mar 192011
A new noise function for GLSL is being proposed by Ian McEwan at Ashima Art. It does not require any setup, i.e. not textures nor uniform arrays. Just add it to your shader source code and call it wherever you want. This means that it is easier to distribute the final shader so that it can be used in other application. It is based on Stefan Gustavson’s paper “Simplex noise demystified” and it runs on OpenGL 1.2 and up.
Recently a number of techniques have been introduced for doing antialiasing as a post-processing step, such as MLAA and just recently SRAA. MLAA attempts to figure out the underlying geometric properties by analyzing the pixel colors in the final image. This can be complemented with depth buffer information such as in Jimenez’s MLAA. SRAA uses super-resolution buffers to figure out the geometry. This demo shows a different approach which instead of trying to figure out the geometry instead passes down the actual geometry information and uses that to very accurately smooth geometric edges.
