Beyond Programmable Shading course notes available

Friday 15th August 2008, 10:15:00 AM, written by Rys

The track notes from the Beyond Programmable Shading course at SIGGRAPH this year are now available.  Run by Mike Houston of AMD and Aaron Lefohn of Intel, the course was designed to give attendees crash courses in the main graphics architectures of the day and how they're programmed (nice intros to the AMD Stream SDK and OpenCL were presented), followed by a track on combining graphics programming and advanced parallel computation on the same chips.

"There are strong indications that the future of interactive graphics involves a programming model more flexible than today's OpenGL/Direct3D pipelines. As such, graphics developers need to have a basic understanding of how to combine emerging parallel programming techniques with the traditional interactive rendering pipeline. This course gives an introduction to several parallel graphics architectures and programming environments, and introduces the new types of graphics algorithms that will be possible."

You can get links to the course notes along with discussion in a thread on our forums.

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Tagging

amd ± intel, siggraph, beyond, programmable, shading, opencl, larrabee, stream, sdk, cuda


Latest Thread Comments (18 total)
Posted by idsn6 on Friday, 15-Aug-08 11:39:25 UTC
Quoting Arwin
Oh wow. I picked the in-games presentation by John Olick first, and was wondering if there'd be mention of the Cell in there. Well as it turns out there is ... and it seems to be good stuff (from this layman's perspective). They seem to put all six SPUs to good use! Of course there's lots more interesting stuff on paralellism in there.
Holy shit. He just went in-depth into the infinite detail sparse voxel octree geometry that isn't scheduled until idTech6.
Don't overlook the explanation bubbles in the upper left.

Posted by cho on Friday, 15-Aug-08 12:34:51 UTC
he also imply there are 2+ triangle setup engines in future gpu (page. 118) ?

Posted by CrazyButcher on Friday, 15-Aug-08 14:08:27 UTC
does anyone know how the presentation looked liked of the megageometry thingie, ie is that screenshot from the presentation, or just a prerendered/dcc app screenshot of the model ?And thanks for making that big zip

Posted by mhouston on Friday, 15-Aug-08 17:04:46 UTC
Quoting Rys
I've grabbed everything that's on the ucdavis site currently and bundled it up into a big bz2 to save people some clicking and bandwidth:Mike, if you'd rather I didn't host the collection like that, let me know and I'll take it down.
We will actually put up a single pdf for everything once we have all the decks updated. I'd prefer that the ucdavis site host everything so that everyone gets the updates as we post them.

Posted by mhouston on Friday, 15-Aug-08 17:05:50 UTC
Quoting CrazyButcher
does anyone know how the presentation looked liked of the megageometry thingie, ie is that screenshot from the presentation, or just a prerendered/dcc app screenshot of the model ?

And thanks for making that big zip
Jon showed a live demo and note that he said this is a side research project for him and this is *not* a demo of tech6.

Posted by pocketmoon66 on Friday, 15-Aug-08 23:52:49 UTC
Nvidia , AMD and Intel all selling their wares is a fantastic sight to behold :) Nvidia do the 'we can do all this NOW - and looks, raytracing!' and Intel saying 'we're not crazy... honest' .

I'd love to see the Nvidia ray trace footage :)

Posted by Rys on Saturday, 16-Aug-08 13:48:15 UTC
Quoting mhouston
We will actually put up a single pdf for everything once we have all the decks updated. I'd prefer that the ucdavis site host everything so that everyone gets the updates as we post them.
No worries, I've removed the bundle.

Posted by Tim Murray on Sunday, 17-Aug-08 20:03:09 UTC
Interesting slides all around--thanks for the heads up, Mike!

Posted by PeterT on Tuesday, 19-Aug-08 15:10:15 UTC
That's an amazing collection of slides. I've only looked over the first 6 sets so far, but I'll get to the other ones as soon as I'm able. I particularly like "Running Code at a Teraflop: How GPU Shader Cores Work" -- it's only stuff most of us already know, but I've never seen the ideas laid out, developed and summarized quite so neatly.

Too bad some of the presentations couldn't be more concrete (particularly the Larrabee and Compute Shaders ones). OpenCL looks really CUDA-like. I expected them to be similar but not to this extent.

Posted by galopin on Thursday, 21-Aug-08 12:23:14 UTC
this courses were really good.

For the john ollic part, the spu/rsx mix is the common admited way to do things as good as possible on ps3, but the raycasting of a preprocessed zbrush mesh on 8800 with cuda was really impressive :)


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