Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's Pedro Sander and Lei Yang, along with University of Virginia assistant professor Jason Lawrence, have published and made available online a paper titled "Geometry-Aware Framebuffer Level of Detail" for Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2008.

The paper introduces a framebuffer level of detail algorithm for controlling an interactive rendering application's pixel workload: "Our basic strategy is to evaluate the shading in a low resolution buffer and, in a second rendering pass, resample this buffer at the desired screen resolution. The size of the lower resolution buffer provides a trade-off between rendering time and the level of detail in the final shading."

To reduce approximation error, a feature-preserving reconstruction technique that approximates the shading near depth and normal discontinuities is used. The paper also demonstrates "how intermediate components of the shading can be selectively resized to provide finer-grained control over resource allocation," as well as a simple control mechanism that "continuously adjusts the amount of resizing necessary to maintain a target framerate."

The techniques covered do not require any preprocessing and are straightforward to implement on GPUs. In addition, they have been shown to provide "significant performance gains for several pixel-bound scenes."

[Via Level of Detail]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Demonstrating developer Allegorithmic's Substance engine, marketing and sales director Alexis Khouri spoke with Intel Software Network about real-time graphics texture streaming for games.

According to Khouri, Allegorithmic's optimized engine allows for bigger game worlds, richer content, and more details: "What is really interesting is that our technology scales very well with multi-cores. We have more than 90% scalability, which means, for example, with 4 cores, we can have almost 14 megabytes per second of compressed textures."

For the demonstration, Allegorithmic produced its own level of Unreal Tournament 3 to show off what can be expected with the company's procedural texture technology: "What is interesting is that the whole texture package of this demonstration fits in 280 KB instead of 300 MB. So, what we did was divide the size of the textures by a thousand."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

NHTV's International Game Architecture and Design senior lecturer and team manager Jacco Bikker has released a new demo and source package for his Arauna real-time ray tracing application. The package - which includes static library files for building a demo application, three tutorial applications, and source code needed to build the libraries and the demo application - can be used freely for non-commercial applications.

According to the Bikker's site, Arauna is an experimental and stable real-time ray tracer developed specifically for game development. While the application isn't yet capable of delivering the performance needed to produce graphics comparable to modern games using a GPU, it is one of the fastest renderers in its class.

Arauna's features include "real-time ray tracing of large triangle meshes (up to 2M per 1GB of memory), full HDR pipeline with post-processing for HDR glow, recursive reflection and refraction, accurate shadows from an unlimited amount of point lights, texturing with bilinear filtering and normal mapping," and more.

Two games have been developed with Arauna so far, both of which were created by students enrolled in NHTV University of Applied Sciences' IGAD program. The most recently completed game, Let There Be Light (pictured), was released earlier this month and is available for download at the Arauna site.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)