Diary of a Graphics Programmer

I am going to teach GPU Programming in the upcoming quarter at UCSD. Look out for course CSE 190. Here is the announcment: Course Objectives...

Transparent objects that require alpha blending cannot be rendered on top in a G-Buffer. Blending two or more normals, depth or position val...

I regularly receive e-mails with the question what kind of books I recommend if someone wants to become a graphics programmer. Here is my cu...

More work-in-progress shots.

Recently I had the need to pack bit fields into 32-bit channels of a 32:32:32:32 fp render target. First of all we can assume that all regis...

Work in progress shot here. More than 8000 lights attached to particles in this hallway. Resolution is 1280x720 and the GPU still runs with ...

There is a new lighting approach that extends the Light Pre-Pass idea. It is called Inferred Lighting and it was presented by Scott Kircher ...

SIGGRAPH is next week and I am still preparing my talk. If you are around please come by and say hi. My talks title is "Light Pre-Pass ...

In the previous "MSAA on the PS3" thread Matt Swoboda jumped in and mentioned that they implemented MSAA on the SPU in the Phyre E...

Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) is quite popular in the moment. ShaderX7 had several articles and there are lots of approaches to grad...

The Killzone 2 team came up with an interesting way to use MSAA on the PS3. You can find it on page 39 of the following slides: http://www.d...

Utilizing the Multisample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) functionality of graphics hardware for deferred lighting can be challenging. Nicolas Thibiero...

Here is a shot of a GPU based particle system with lights attached to each particle. I used Emil Persson's example Deferred Shading prog...

Several companies adopted the Light Pre-Pass idea, modified it or came up with similar ideas: Crytek: they call it Deferred lighting contrar...

Over the last few years I was looking into the 3D Supershape formula described by Paul Bourke here and originally developed by Johan Gielis...

Today GTA IV was launched a year ago and it is my last day where I am employed at Rockstar Games. After fantastic more than four years I fel...

I got the whole development environment going and wrote a few small little graphics demos for it. All the PowerVR demos I tried ran on it ni...

In the last few days I setup a development environment for a BeagleBoard (see beagleboard.org). I wanted to hold the next-gen environment fo...

ShaderX7 has more than 800 pages. I like the following screenshot from Amazon.com: ShaderX8 is already announced. Proposals are due by May ...

I switched from Maple to Mathematica last week. One of my small little projects is to store all the graphics algorithms I liked to visualize...

A few of my friends contributed to the book "Team Leadership in the Game Industry" by Seth Spaulding II. So I was curious what you...

I am really looking forward to Mike Abrash's and Tom Forsyth's talks at GDC about Larrabee: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles...

I updated the ShaderX7 website at http://www.shaderx7.com/ There is now the first draft of the cover and the Table of Content. Enjoy! :-) As...

This issue of the iPhone / iPod Touch programmig tips series focuses on some aspects of VFP assembly programming. My friend Noel Llopis brou...

To make my collection of normal map techniques more complete on this blog I also have to mention a special normal mapping technique that Ins...

I recently bumped into a post by Roderic Vicaire on the www.gamedev.net forums. It is h ere. Obviously there is no generic solution to handl...

Two days ago I commited a major Oolong update. Please check out the Oolong Engine blog at http://www.oolongengine.com I updated the memory m...

A christmas present: we just went public with "Programming Vertex, Geometry and Pixel Shaders". I am a co-author of this book and ...

Kyle Wilson wrote up a summary about how good middleware should be: http://gamearchitect.net/2008/09/19/good-middleware/ An interesting read...

Just realized that one of the projects I contributed some code to went public in the meantime. You can get the source code at http://code.go...

This is the christmas issue of the iPhone / iPod touch programming tips. This time we deal with the touch interface. The main challenge I fo...

This time I will cover Point Sprites in the iPhone / iPod touch programming tip. The idea is that a set of points -as the simplest primitive...

Eric Haines provided a home for the three ShaderX books that are now available for free. Thanks so much for this! Here is the URL http://tog...

This time we are covering another fixed-function technique used in DirectX 7/8 times: Matrix Palettes support is an extension of OpenGL ES 1...

My GDC talk was accepted. I am happy ... yeaaahhh :-)

A friend just asked me about how to design a shadow map system for many lights with shadows. A quite good explanation was given in the follo...

Here is an interesting post on Dual-Paraboloid Shadow maps. Pat Wilson describes a single pass approach here http://www.gamedev.net/communi...

Let's look today at the "pixel shader" level of the hardware functionality. The iPhone Application programming guide says that...

All of the source code presented in this series is based on the Oolong engine. I will refer to the examples when it is appropriate so that e...

Today I will cover the necessary files of an iP* application and the folders that potentially hold data on the device from your application....

I just happen to bump into a few slides on the new HLSL 5.0 syntax. The slides are at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Family...

Today's tip will deal with the setup of your development environment. As a Mac newbie I was having a hard time to get used to the enviro...

This is the first of a series of iPhone / iPod programming tips. Starting iPhone development requires first the knowledge of the underlying ...