David Luebke 1 7/8/2016 Real-Time Rendering CS 551-4/651-3 David Luebke

David Luebke 2 7/8/2016 Demo Time ● Should we have a 5-10 minute “demo time” to open each class? ■ Students pick game to demo ○ Focus: real-time graphics, not game play, cut scenes, etc. ■ Students responsible for bringing platform to classroom ○ I can provide PC (GF3), PS2, maybe Xbox from lab ■ Students rotate duty each class or each week ● For today, some NVIDIA GeForce2-type demos

David Luebke 3 7/8/2016 Introduction ● The changing face of real-time rendering ■ The good old days: ○ SGI was king ○ A slew of PC vendors ■ Today: ○ SGI is selling real estate ○ NVIDIA, ATI rule the world

David Luebke 4 7/8/2016 Comparison: SGI InfiniteReality (1998) vs. NVIDIA GeForce4 (2002) MetricSGI IRNVIDIA GF4 Triangles/demosec13 million136 million Pixels/demosec4.8 billion Texture memory64 MB128 MB Bump mappingNopeNo sweat Programmable vertex engine?You kidding?Oh, yeah Programmable pixel engine?Get realYeah baby Form factorMini-fridgevideocassette Cost$100,000$300 The real news!!!

David Luebke 5 7/8/2016 Rate of Change a.k.a “Stop the technology, I want to get on” ● SGI: new product every 3 years ● NVIDIA: new product every 9/18 months ● Current commodity cards double in performance every 10 months or so ■ Far outstripping Moore’s Law… ● Exciting new features being introduced at a breathtaking rate: ■ Programmable pipelines, floating-point support, hardware occlusion support

David Luebke 6 7/8/2016 Summary ● These are interesting times for real-time rendering: ■ Commodity graphics cards are becoming fantastically capable ■ The rate of ongoing improvement is dizzying ■ New algorithms, long-offline algorithms becoming possible ■ Hard to keep up, even for “experts” ● What’s pushing the technology curve?

David Luebke 7 7/8/2016 Video Games ● Undoubtedly the driving force behind this revolution ■ This year the video game industry surpassed the film industry (wave hands) ■ Commodity parts: Pentium 4 vs GF4

David Luebke 8 7/8/2016 The Course: General Topics ● This class will study real-time rendering, with a particular focus on the hardware and algorithms underlying 3D game engines ■ Generally PC hardware rather than consoles ■ Generally NVIDIA hardware (that’s what we use) ■ Generally OpenGL (DX more apropos, but…) ● We won’t study: ■ Gameplay, storylines, AI, game art, production process, artist tools, network layers, OO game design, audio, (much) physics, (much) animation

David Luebke 9 7/8/2016 The Course: Workload ● This is a project course, all grades from programming assignments: ■ First half: 4 individual assignments – “building blocks” of a game engine ■ Second half: team project, with several checkpoints – game engine with demo ● Graduate-level course ■ A game engine is a big program ■ May well be more work (but also more rewarding) than any course you’ve ever had

David Luebke 10 7/8/2016 The Course: Syllabus ● The web page is the syllabus…

David Luebke 11 7/8/2016 Review: The Graphics Pipeline ● The next lecture will go over the traditional graphics pipeline ● The big picture: ApplicationGeometryRasterizer

David Luebke 12 7/8/2016 Programmable Pipelines ● Recent hardware offers the option of replacing portions of the pipeline with user-programmed stages ■ Vertex shader: replaces fixed-function transform and lighting ■ Pixel shader: replaces texturing stages

David Luebke 13 7/8/2016 Programmable Pipelines ● The amount of programmability is increasing by leaps and bounds ■ Vertex shaders: more instructions, variable looping, branching, subroutines ■ Pixel shaders: still SIMD, but with more instructions, unlimited texture accesses, pixel kill ● The data formats are also improving ■ IEEE floating point throughout the pixel pipeline! ■ Various versions