Disney Animation Data Sets

• the history behind the release of the Disney datasets of large-scale scenes
• comparison of the scene rendered using Disney’s renderer and PBRT 3

A High-Performance Software Graphics Pipeline Architecture for the GPU

• paper discussing the software implementation of the rasterization pipeline using compute shaders
• using a dynamic approach that adjusts to the workload dynamically
• comparison within environments taken from games to evaluate the pipeline overhead
• showcase of what kind of effects are possible with a software approach
  • custom primitive rendering
  • programmable blending
  • adaptive supersampling
• in-depth performance comparison against hardware and other software approaches

Followup to Atmospheric Scattering—Part 1

• follow up series of 2012’s GPU Pro 3 model
• dynamic, real-time atmospheric model without pre-calculations
• explains aerial perspective and the Chapman approximation to optical depth

Visualizing 2D Vector Fields

• showcase different ways to visualize a 2d flow field
• presentation of an algorithm that allows the creation of loopable animations from vector fields

TL;DR of the paper 'Conservative Z-Prepass for Frustum-Traced Irregular Z-Buffers'

• summary of “Conservative Z-Prepass for Frustum-Traced Irregular Z-Buffers” paper
• explanation of irregular z-buffer and conservative shadow maps and how they are combined

Sampling Anisotropic Microfacet BRDF

• mathematical derivations of importance sampling for GGX, Beckmann, and Blinn-Phong

Writing a Modern Metal App from Scratch: Part 2

• part 2 of the Metal tutorial
• adding support for depth buffers, some simple lighting with textures
• extending the application to support multiple lights, objects, and materials with some basic animations

Vulkan input attachments and sub passes

• explanation of Vulkan render passes example
• how to create Render passes
• manage shader bindings for input attachments and how to use them from within the GPU shader

Musings on cross-platform graphics engine architectures – Part 1

• start of a series about graphics engine architecture
• core design goals and pillars for the author’s graphics engine
  • embrace concepts introduced in modern graphics APIs
  • make job-based multi-threaded execution a first class citizen
  • define a clear, small API, but be open towards extension

Revisiting The Vertex Cache: Understanding and Optimizing Vertex Processing on the modern GPU

• a new vertex cache optimization algorithm that is able to improve cache usage on NVidia hardware by taking advantage of vertex batch sizes

TL;DR of the paper 'Revisiting The Vertex Cache: Understanding and Optimizing Vertex Processing on the modern GPU'

• summary of the “Revisiting The Vertex Cache: Understanding and Optimizing Vertex Processing on the modern GPU” paper

Shader Showcase Saturday #2

• shader showcase of different waterfall effects

metal shaders: color inversion

• explains what color inversion is and how to implement it using metal

Multipass Shaders (& inverted Hull outlines)

• tutorial on how to use multi-pass shaders in unity to implement an outline drawing effect
• first pass object is drawn like usual
• in the second pass drawn with front face culling and slightly scaled up to define the outline