Book Review: shaderx 7

As a game graphics developer's Annual Dinner, shaderx 7 was finally published. The thickness of 800 pages, nearly 2kg, creates a new record for the shaderx series. I just got a short review.

There are five articles in geometry manipulation, all about real-time Tessellate Based on geometry shader. One article by the ATI technical master Natalya also mentions tesslellation pipeline in the upcoming DX 11. Just like the beginning of the GPU gems3 article, these technologies are very good, powerful, and also a hardware killer. They have been popularized in games for at least two or three years.

Rendering Techniques has a total of 9 articles. <Effect soft participation> This solves the obvious joint problem between the billboard and the object. It is a simple and practical technology that can be applied immediately to the actual product. <Fast skin shading> This is an improvement on sking rendering in GPU gems3. <An efficient and physically plausible real-time Shading Model> improved and integrated the most common BlinN-Phong and cook-Torrance illumination models to obtain a better illumination model, it improves the authenticity and diversity of materials, and is a technology worth trying. <Graphics Techniques in crackdown> This article comprehensively introduces various rendering algorithms used in crackdown. Based on actual game articles, all the technologies mentioned are very feasible, in particular, one of the "simplified" Deferred rendering algorithms is very interesting. In addition, there are three articles related to deferred rendering. We can see that deferred rendering is becoming increasingly popular. If you are implementing DR, you must not miss it.
 
Image space consists of three parts. Post-process plays a very important role in game rendering, but it is often limited by the cost of a large number of texture access, <efficient post-processing with improtance sampling> describes how to improve the performance of special effects such as Tong mapping, depth field, and AO through improtance sampling. <Efficient real-time motion blure for multiple rigid objects> This is an improvement on motioin blur in GPU gems3, which improves the granularity of Blur from full screen to per object. The last article introduces a very cool watercolor filter.

Four articles in shadows are aimed at improving the existing Shadow technology and there is no revolutionary technology.

Three articles about environmental effects: <dynamic weather effects>. This article introduces particle-based rain, snow, and weather Technology in Project Gotham Racing 4, compared with the post-process algorithm of ATI toyshop demo, particle rain and snow are more practical and versatile, and the effect is better, and can be run only with the support of SM 2.0. <Interactive hydraulic erosion on the GPU> fluid rendering, especially the interaction between water and terrain, features beautiful effects and amazing hardware requirements.

Global Illumination effects has reached an unprecedented 8 articles. Is undoubtedly a year of rapid development of ssao technology. Almost all eight articles are related to ssao, and even screen-space radiosity has been developed. Obviously, ssao is superior to other GI technologies in both performance and ease of use. It is expected that the GI Algorithm Based on screen-space will gradually become popular in games, especially for dx10 games, there is almost no reason not to implement ssao.
 
Handheld device4 describes graphics development for hand-held devices based on OpenGL ES. However, many optimization ideas are useful even in PC or host development.

The number of 3D engine design articles has also increased to seven. I haven't taken a closer look yet. I just gave a brief look at it, and all of the discussions are high-level topics. It is worth mentioning that chapter 1 on the CD is actually an open-source engine named elemental engine II. The DVD not only contains all the source code, but also includes video tutorials for nearly 8.7 minutes, describes the engine design and use.

The last five beyond pixels and triangles articles have different directions and are not read yet.

 

PS: attached directory http://www.shaderx7.com/TOC.html