Archive for 'uncategorized'I can has vertex?
From AnandTech’s Radeon HD 4850 & 4870 review: I can has vertex data? Edit: gee, nowadays the reviews have funny performance measures. Like, FPS per square centimeter (of GPU die size)! It does actually make (some) sense, but it’s still funny. Frames per second per square centimeter… mmm… delicious. Encoding floats to RGBA, againHey, it looks like the quest for encoding floats to RGBA textures (part 1, part 2) did not end yet. Here’s the “best available” code that I have now:
Before I thought that bias should be +0.5/255.0 normally, except it had to be around -0.55/255.0 on Radeon cards (older than Radeon HD series). Well, turns out I was wrong, the bias mostly has to be around -0.5/255.0. Here’s the list (same bias on Windows/D3D9 and OS X/OpenGL, so it seems to be hardware dependent, and not something in API/drivers):
Those are the best bias values I could find. Still, every once in a while (rarely) encoding the value to RGBA texture and reading it back would produce something where one channel is half a bit off. Not a problem if you were encoding numbers were originally 0..1 range, but for example if you were encoding something that spans over whole range of the camera, then 0..1 range gets expanded into 0..FarPlane… And all of a sudden there are huge precision errors, up to the point of being unusable. I just tried doing a quick’n'dirty depth of field and soft particles implementation using depth encoded this way… not good. Oh well. Has anyone successfully used encoding of high precision number into RGBA channels before? Painting and wallpaperingWe repainted our living room and did one wall in wallpaper (real actual ones, not for the desktop). This is fun but takes a couple of days to get done, half of that time spent moving stuff outside the room and moving it back afterwards.
One thing I learned is that painting with semi-glossy paint is very different from painting with matte one. Semi-glossy is very sensitive to paint strokes, pressure and a lot of other things, and if you’re not extremely careful you’ll get a wall that looks like with a varying gloss or specular power. Of course, varying specular exponent would be cool in a shader demo of 2001, but it’s not a cool thing to have on your room wall. And it’s not 2001 anymore either! After that we just went for a week to Crete. Here’s an assortment of small random pictures. Now back to work!
Windows on a Mac experienceA post on GrammerJack blog made me post similar impressions about Mac vs Windows etc. So:
I was the evil guy to install Windows on my MacBookPro (via BootCamp) as well. That was like a month ago. The thing is, I think I haven’t booted into windows for like 20 days on this machine. At first I though gee, I’ll use VisualStudio on this machine, will watch demos and have a proper Subversion client! But I use VisualStudio, watch demos and have a proper Subversion client on my work PC, so there are not that many reasons to boot windows on the laptop… Plus BootCamp has small annoyances that GrammerJack mentions: no two finger scrolling (it’s the best thing in laptops I’ve ever seen), no backspace key, function key not supported, the machine never seems to come to proper sleep (i.e. it’s always hot to touch), trackpad sensitivity and precision much worse than on OSX etc. And in general, I must admit that I kinda like OSX. “It feels nice” would be my best attempt at explanation, for I can’t think of any serious reasons why I like it. Well, yeah, the UI is nice etc. Mind you, I like Windows as well, but at least on this laptop, OSX “feels much nicer”. Now if only Apple could throw the bunch of crap called XCode away and make something like VisualStudio+VisualAssist; and if only OpenGL would be so sweet to use as D3D! I’d jump on OSX bandwagon immediately and be a happy man. Alas, XCode is just lighyears behind (*). (*) Though Apple has some really cool development tools as well (Shark etc.) Back to some shader programmingThere is something magic in programming shaders. Like, when you edit one of our standard shaders and save, say, nine instructions in it - the feeling is really good. Maybe because, well, it’s a standard shader - so that means everyone’s graphics will actually render faster. Nice!
Maybe it’s because shaders are such a short piece of code, without too complex dependencies… I’m sure anyone who knows graphics hardware will corect me here, but let’s oversimplify and pretend that shaders actually execute in a simple way… So when you make a shader shorter, you pretty much know it’s going to be faster. When you make it “look better”, it almost certainly will look better. Try doing that in your regular big codebase - by optimizing something you may break something else; and in general you have no clue what to optimize unless you do your profiling homework. So, my take is that shaders are much simpler, so the joys of looking at assembly output actually make sense. So, yeah, I’m back to some shader programming. Why doesn’t this feature exist?Found this quote from Raymond Chen today (here):
So brilliant. The holy grail of shadowsIt just occurred to me: it seems that noone has ever made a shadowing system that does shadows from anything onto anything, with zero artifacts, with no corner cases, always looking good, running fast and on any sensible hardware.
Hm… sounds like a challenge! ;) Back to reading. Lost GardenLost Garden is good - about game design and related things from (ex) Anark guy (hi Chris!). E.g. this one (a practical definition of innovation in game design):
ListeningHeadphones on, winamp alternatively playing The Jupiter Sound and Four Themes and a Masterplan by Little Bitchard. Just the right kind of music for asp.net coding. At least the music is good :)
Project Hoshimi 2006Work has really started on the next version of Project Hoshimi for Microsoft. We’ve got to:
Ok, back to thinking about possible eye candy and the network protocol. |
