Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 105 — November 3, 2019

Dev Preview of New DirectX 12 Features

• the post introduces new D3D12 features available with latest win10 preview version
• DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1 introduces ExecuteIndirect, dynamic raytracing PSO additions and Inline Raytracing
• Inline Raytracing allows RayQuery to be called from every shader stage
• DirectX Mesh Shader are similar to nvidia mesh shaders, allowing more flexibily in the vertex processing pipeline
• DirectX Sampler Feedback allows the recording of which parts of textures have been accessed
• enabling more fine grained streaming and texture space shading scenarios

[video] How to Write Shaders in Unity - an Easy introduction by Febucci

• the video explains the basic of shaders in Unity for beginners

Arm donates Vulkan Best Practice for Mobile Developers to The Khronos Group

• the ARM developed sets of samples to showcase best practices for Vulkan on mobile is now open-source and part of Khronos
• article has list of samples and tutorials for a number of different areas

Vulkan Releases Unified Samples Repository

• Khronos published a unified Vulkan Samples Repository
• all samples are based on the same framework and have been reviewed and are maintained by Khronos

My take on shaders: Grass Shader (Part I)

• the article shows the Unity shader implementation for stylized and unlit grass
• a geometry shader is used to spawn a variable number of grass blades based on camera distance
• grass movement by wind is emulated with a displacement texture

ray tracing a tiny procedural planet

• starts by showing how to create a small 2D world procedurally
• small overview of explicit vs implcit surface ray tracing
• then shows the steps used to render a procedural mini planet
• including ocean waves, mountains and clouds

[video] Deriving the SDF of a Box

• the video presents how to derive the SDF for a box

SIGGRAPH 2019 Highlight: Finding a Practical Hybrid Anti-Aliasing Algorithm

• summary of SIGGRAPH 2019 for a hybrid solution between temporal anti-aliasing with adaptive ray tracing
• using heuristics to detect when adaptive ray tracing provides the best improvements