DirectX 12 – Lesson 4
In this lesson, you learn how to load textures into your DirectX 12 powered applications. You learn how to use the compute pipeline to generate mipmaps for textures. You also learn about texture samplers and how to specify a texture sampler in the root signature. A texture sampler is used to control how the texels are read in a shader.
DirectX 12 – Lesson 3
In this tutorial, you will be introduced to several classes that will help you to create a robust and flexible framework for building DirectX 12 applications. Some of the problems that are solved with the classes introduced in this lesson are managing CPU descriptors, copying CPU descriptors to GPU visible descriptor heaps, managing resource state across multiple threads, and uploading dynamic buffer data to the GPU. To automatically manage the state and descriptors for resources, a custom command list class is also provided.
DirectX 12 – Lesson 2
This is the second lesson in a series of lessons to teach you how to create a DirectX 12 powered application from scratch. In this lesson, vertex and index data is uploaded to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for rendering. Basic vertex and pixel shaders are described and how to create a Pipeline State Object (PSO) that utilizes those shaders is also described. A root signature defines the parameters that are used by the stages of the rendering pipeline. In this lesson a simple root signature is created that defines a single constant buffer that contains the Model-View-Projection (MVP) matrix that is used to rotate a model in the scene.
DirectX 12
This is the first lesson in a series of lessons to teach you how to create a DirectX 12 application from scratch. In this lesson, you will learn how to query for DirectX 12 capable display adapters that are available, create a DirectX 12 device, create a swap-chain, and you will also learn how to present the swap chain back buffer to the screen. In this lesson, you will also create a command queue and a command list and learn how to synchronize the CPU and GPU operations in order to correctly implement N-buffered rendering.
Volume Tiled Forward Shading
In this post, Volume Tiled Forward Shading rendering is described. Volume Tiled Forward Shading is based on Tiled and Clustered Forward Shading described by Ola Olsson et. al. [13][20]. Similar to Clustered Shading, Volume Tiled Forward Shading builds a 3D grid of volume tiles (clusters) and assigns the lights in the scene to the volumes tiles. Only the lights that are intersecting with the volume tile for the current pixel need to be considered during shading. By sorting the lights into volume tiles, the performance of the shading stage can be greatly improved. By building a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) over the lights in the scene, the performance of the light assignment to tiles phase can also be improved. The Volume Tiled Forward Shading technique combined with the BVH optimization allows for millions of light sources to be active in the scene.
Forward+ with HLSL
In this article, I will analyze and compare three rendering algorithms:
DirectX
In this article, I will introduce the reader to DirectX 11. We will create a simple demo application that can be used to create more complex DirectX examples and demos. After reading this article, you should be able to create a DirectX application and render geometry using a simple vertex shader and pixel shader.
Understanding Quaternions
In this article I will attempt to explain the concept of Quaternions in an easy to understand way. I will explain how you might visualize a Quaternion as well as explain the different operations that can be applied to quaternions. I will also compare applications of matrices, euler angles, and quaternions and try to explain when you would want to use quaternions instead of Euler angles or matrices and when you would not.
NVIDIA Cg
In this article I will introduce the reader to shader programming using the Cg shader programming language. I will use OpenGL graphics API to communicate with the Cg shaders. This article does not explain how use OpenGL. If you require an introduction to OpenGL, you can follow my previous article titled Introduction to OpenGL.
Postprocess Effect
In this article I will discuss how you can use OpenGL textures and buffers in a CUDA kernel. I will demonstrate a simple post-process effect that can be applied to off-screen textures and then rendered to the screen using a full-screen quad. I will assume the reader has some basic knowledge of C/C++ programming, OpenGL, and CUDA. If you lack OpenGL knowledge, you can refer to my previous article titled Introduction to OpenGL or if you have never done anything with CUDA, you can follow my previous article titled Introduction to CUDA.