Category Archives: Graphics

GPUView is a powerful tool for GPU/CPU interaction profiling for Windows. It’s interface isn’t very user friendly, but it gets job done. I used it for optimizing in-house GPU lightmapper and spend some time trying to find a way to add … Continue reading →

LA Noire has some amazing tech for face animations. Basically actors are filmed from multiple cameras and resulting movies are converted to a keyframed animation and animated textures. All the textures are captured in neutral lighting conditions, so usually lighting … Continue reading →

A small list of basic and sometimes overlooked shader optimization possibilities. This are very small gains, but they can sum up and maybe there will be some free time for an additional point light or a better shadow filter? Full screen … Continue reading →

Today CPUs are quite fast, so why not use them to draw some triangles? Especially when all the cool kids use it them for software occlusion culling. Time to take back some of CPU time from gameplay programmers and use … Continue reading →

Interesting idea from Call Of Juarez 2 about rendering deferred light geometry. When deferred light geometry intersects with camera you need to switch culling and turn off zbuffer. In COJ2, instead of testing intersection on CPU and switching states, they … Continue reading →

Particles are usually some kind of simple structs stored in an array. Then every frame vertex buffer is filled using that array. You really don’t want to sort them (at least not all particles and sometimes sorted particles don’t look … Continue reading →

If You don’t know what’s premultiplied alpha and why it solves all the world’s problems, just read Tom Forsyth on premultiplied alpha or Shawn Hargreaves on premultiplied alpha. Pros: Better quality for textures with sharp alpha cutouts. Removes some blending … Continue reading →