GPU Pro: Advanced Rendering Techniques

This book covers essential tools and techniques for programming the graphics processing unit. Brought to you by Wolfgang Engel and the same team of editors who made the ShaderX series a success, this volume covers advanced rendering techniques, engine design, GPGPU techniques, related mathematical techniques, and game postmortems. A special emphasis is placed on handheld programming to account for the increased importance of graphics on mobile devices, especially the iPhone and iPod touch.

Example programs and source code can be downloaded from the book’s CRC Press web page.

Table of Contents

Part I: Mathematics
1 GPU Color Quantization
2 Visualize Your Shadow Map Techniques

Part II: Geometry Manipulation
1 As Simple as Possible Tessellation for Interactive Applications
2 Rule-Based Geometry Synthesis in Real-Time
3 GPU-Based NURBS Geometry Evaluation and Rendering
4 Polygonal-Functional Hybrids for Computer Animation and Games

Part III: Rendering Techniques
1 Quadtree Displacement Mapping with Height Blending
2 NPR Effects Using the Geometry Shader
3 Alpha Blending as a Post-Process
4 Virtual Texture Mapping 101

Part IV: Global Illumination
1 Fast, Stencil-Based Multiresolution Splatting for Indirect Illumination
2 Screen-Space Directional Occlusion
3 Real-Time Multi-Bounce Ray-Tracing with Geometry Impostors

Part V: Image Space
1 Anisotropic Kuwahara Filtering on the GPU
2 Edge Anti-aliasing by Post-Processing
3 Environment Mapping with Floyd-Steinberg Halftoning
4 Hierarchical Item Buffers for Granular Occlusion Culling
5 Realistic Depth of Field in Postproduction
6 Real-Time Screen Space Cloud Lighting
7 Screen-Space Subsurface Scattering

Part VI: Handheld Devices
1 Migration to OpenGL ES 2
2 Touchscreen-Based User Interaction
3 iPhone 3GS Graphics Development and Optimization Strategies
4 Optimizing a 3D UI Engine for Mobile Devices

Part VII: Shadows
1 Fast Conventional Shadow Filtering
2 Hybrid Min/Max Plane-Based Shadow Maps
3 Shadow Mapping for Omnidirectional Light Using Tetrahedron Mapping
4 Screen Space Soft Shadows

Part VIII: 3D Engine Design
1 Multi-Fragment Effects on the GPU Using Bucket Sort
2 Parallelized Light Pre-Pass Rendering with the Cell Broadband Engine
3 Porting Code between Direct3D9 and OpenGL 2
4 Practical Thread Rendering for DirectX 9

Part IX: Game Postmortems
1 Stylized Rendering in Spore
2 Rendering Techniques in Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
3 Making it Large, Beautiful, Fast, and Consistent: Lessons Learned
4 Destructible Volumetric Terrain

Part X: Beyond Pixels and Triangles
1 Parallelized Implementation of Universal Visual Computer
2 Accelerating Virtual Texturing Using CUDA
3 Efficient Rendering of Highly Detailed Volumetric Scenes with GigaVoxels
4 Spatial Binning on the GPU
5 Real-Time Interaction between Particles and the Dynamic Mesh onthe GPU