GPU Pro 4: Advanced Rendering Techniques

GPU Pro⁴: Advanced Rendering Techniques presents ready-to-use ideas and procedures that can help solve many of your day-to-day graphics programming challenges. Focusing on interactive media and games, the book covers up-to-date methods producing real-time graphics.

Section editors Wolfgang Engel, Christopher Oat, Carsten Dachsbacher, Michal Valient, Wessam Bahnassi, and Sebastien St-Laurent have once again assembled a high-quality collection of cutting-edge techniques for advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) programming. Divided into six sections, the book begins with discussions on the ability of GPUs to process and generate geometry in exciting ways. It next introduces new shading and global illumination techniques for the latest real-time rendering engines and explains how image space algorithms are becoming a key way to achieve a more realistic and higher quality final image. Moving on to the difficult task of rendering shadows, the book describes the state of the art in real-time shadow maps. It then covers game engine design, including quality, optimization, and high-level architecture. The final section explores approaches that go beyond the normal pixel and triangle scope of GPUs as well as techniques that take advantage of the parallelism of modern graphic processors in a variety of applications.

Useful to beginners and seasoned game and graphics programmers alike, this color book offers practical tips and techniques for creating real-time graphics. Example programs and source code are available for download on the book’s CRC Press web page. The directory structure of the online material closely follows the book structure by using the chapter numbers as the name of the subdirectory.

Table of Contents

I. Geometry Manipulation
1. GPU Terrain Subdivision and Tessellation
2. Introducing the Programmable Vertex Pulling Rendering Pipeline
3. A WebGL Globe Rendering Pipeline
II. Rendering
1. Practical Planar Reflections Using Cubemaps and Image Proxies
2. Real-Time Ptex and Vector Displacement
3. Decoupled Deferred Shading on the GPU
4. Tiled Forward Shading
5. Forward+: A Step Toward Film-Style Shading in Real Time
6. Progressive Screen-Space Multichannel Surface Voxelization
7. Rasterized Voxel-Based Dynamic Global Illumination
III. Image Space
1. The Skylanders SWAP Force Depth-of-Field Shader
2. Simulating Partial Occlusion in Post-Processing Depth-of-Field Methods
3. Second-Depth Antialiasing
4. Practical Framebuffer Compression
5. Coherence-Enhancing Filtering on the GPU
IV. Shadows
1. Real-Time Deep Shadow Maps
V. Game Engine Design
1. An Aspect-Based Engine Architecture
2. Kinect Programming with Direct3D 11
3. A Pipeline for Authored Structural Damage
VI. GPGPU
1. Bit-Trail Traversal for Stackless LBVH on DirectCompute
2. Real-Time JPEG Compression Using DirectCompute
About the Editors
About the Contributors