In the previous blog post we discussed a few potential neural network (MLP) applications in rendering and one of the conclusions was that although easy to implement, inference cost can be quite high, especially for larger networks which makes a compute shader implementation of it impractical in many cases. For that reason, specialised hardware has [ ]
In recent years, neural networks have started to find their way into many areas of rendering. While antialiasing and upscaling are probably the most well‑known uses, they’re far from the only ones—texture compression, material representation, and indirect lighting are all active areas of research and development. I recently started tinkering with neural networks, experimenting with [ ]
Subdividing a 3D space into cells or voxels and using positional and/or directional information to directly index into it is a popular method to store and access local data, typically using 3D textures. This has been the basis of many global illumination algorithms, it is been used to store light lists, specular probes and decals [ ]
Following up on the previous post on GPU utilization and performance, and to provide a practical example, I expanded a bit on a topic discussed in brief: vertex shader exports and their impact on performance. To measure the performance cost, I set up a small experiment, rendering 250 instances of a model 10 times, each [ ]
Drill deep into a GPU s architecture and at its heart you will find a large number of SIMD units whose purpose is to read data, perform some vector or scalar ALU (VALU or SALU) operation on it and write the result out to a rendertarget or buffer. Those units can be found in what Nvidia [ ]
GPUs make work parallelism very easy by design: each drawcall/dispatch shader instruction operates on batches of vertices, pixels, threads in general at the same time automatically. On the other hand, GPU work is pipelined, its architecture comprises various specialised (fixed function like input assembler, raster) and programmable (like Streaming Multiprocessor/SM) units connected by queues and […
Mesh shaders, introduced back in 2018 as an NVidia Turing and later as an AMD RDNA2 feature, is an evolution of the geometry pipeline which removes a number of fixed function units like the Input Assembler and Tessellator as well as the Vertex shader/Domain Shader/Geometry Shader stages and replaces them with a simpler, programmable pipeline [ ]
I posted a few days ago a screenshot of the long shader ISA code produced by the RGA compiler for a single atan2() instruction. The post got quite a large engagement and it felt like a lot of people were surprised by the fact, so I decided to write a post to discuss the hidden [ ]
In the previous blog post I described a simple workgraph implementation of a hybrid shadowing system. It was based on a tile classification system with 3 levels (or nodes in workgraph parlance), one to decide which tiles are facing away from the Sun, and as such need no shadows, one to raymarch the surviving tiles [ ]
Workgraphs is a new feature added recently to DirectX12 with hardware support from NVidia and AMD. It aims to enable a GPU to produce and consume work without involving the CPU in dispatching that work. I spent some time the past couple of weeks experimenting with workgraphs and I ve put together this high level tutorial [ ]