David Luebke 1 692009

1
Real-Time Rendering

• CS 551-4/651-3David Luebke

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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

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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

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ComparisonSGI InfiniteReality (1998) vs. NVIDIA
GeForce4 (2002)

• Metric SGI IR NVIDIA GF4
• Triangles/demosec 13 million 136 million
• Pixels/demosec 4.8 billion
• Texture memory 64 MB 128 MB
• Bump mapping Nope No sweat
• Programmable vertex engine? You kidding? Oh,
  yeah
• Programmable pixel engine? Get real Yeah
  baby
• Form factor Mini-fridge videocassette
• Cost 100,000 300

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Rate of Changea.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 Moores Law
• Exciting new features being introduced at a
  breathtaking rate
• Programmable pipelines, floating-point support,
  hardware occlusion support

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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
• Whats pushing the technology curve?

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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

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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 (thats what we use)
• Generally OpenGL (DX more apropos, but)
• We wont study
• Gameplay, storylines, AI, game art, production
  process, artist tools, network layers, OO game
  design, audio, (much) physics, (much) animation

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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 youve ever had

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The Course Syllabus

• The web page is the syllabus

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Review The Graphics Pipeline

• The next lecture will go over the traditional
  graphics pipeline
• The big picture

Application
Geometry
Rasterizer
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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

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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