Matt
Pharr, Neoptica
“Interactive Rendering in The Post-GPU Era”
Abstract:
Two decades ago, offline renderers introduced programmable shading
into the
graphics pipeline. Half a decade ago, hardware programmable shading
revolutionized interactive rendering. Today, heterogeneous parallel
rendering architectures with hundreds of GFLOPS of both CPU and GPU
computational capability (e.g. the PS3, XBox 360, and future multi-core
PCs) are once again redefining interactive graphics. These
architectures
will be even more disruptive than programmable GPUs were as they free
the
graphics pipeline from the constraints of the unidirectional, data-
parallel
computation model, replacing it with an interactive rendering
pipeline that
is able to efficiently incorporate dynamic, data-dependent algorithms,
complex data structures, as well as the traditional (and very efficient)
rasterization and data-parallel shading model.
These architectures are a huge step forward for developers, providing
computational resources that are suited to a much broader range of
graphics
computation than today's PCs with GPUs. In this talk, I will discuss
the
opportunities that these architectures present to developers of graphics
software as well as the substantial challenges that they pose. The
transition from fixed-function to programmable GPUs was not painless;
now
developers must cope with a number of difficult problems that are
hidden on
today's PCs with GPUs, including exposed parallelism, asynchronous
parallel
computation, and distributing computation across heterogeneous
processing
elements with varying capabilities. I will argue that if the
algorithms used
on these architectures are carefully redesigned accounting for the
new capabilities
of these systems, then interactive graphics may soon see even more
revolutionary
change than has been seen with programmable GPUs over the past few
years.
Bio:
Matt Pharr recently
cofounded Neoptica, a company devoted to developing software for
advanced graphics on next-generation architectures. Previously, he was
a member of the technical staff in the Software Architecture group at
NVIDIA, where he also served as the editor of the book “GPU Gems
2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General
Purpose Computation”, a collection covering the latest ideas in
GPU programming written by experts in the industry. He was one of the
founders of Exluna, a company that developed rendering software and
tools; Exluna was acquired by NVIDIA in 2002. He previously worked in
the Rendering R&D group at Pixar, working on the RenderMan
rendering system.
Matt and Greg Humphreys are the authors of the textbook
“Physically Based Rendering: From Theory To
Implementation”, which has been used in graduate-level computer
graphics courses at over ten universities, including Stanford,
University of North Carolina, and University of Virginia. He holds a
B.S. from Yale University and a M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford
University, where he researched theoretical and systems issues related
to rendering.
Peter-Pike
Sloan, Microsoft
“Direct3D 10 and Beyond”
Abstract:
Direct3D 10 represents a significant collaborative effort between
Microsoft, application developers and hardware vendors. The graphics
pipeline has been extended and enhanced in several new ways: A
programmable “Geometry Shader” stage that receives whole
primitives and can output zero or more primitives, the ability to
stream out vertices/geometry to buffers, and a common shader
instruction set that includes integer and bitwise operations. Many of
the driver model, API and pipeline changes were motivated by
experiences and inefficiencies observed when creating Direct3D 9
applications. This talk covers the new pipeline, motivation, goals and
process used in creating Direct3D 10. It will also touch on current
thinking regarding challenges and possible improvements that could be
made in future versions of Direct3D.
Bio:
Peter-Pike Sloan has
been in the DirectX group at Microsoft for the past four years. Prior
to that he was a member of the graphics group in Microsoft Research, a
staff member at the Scientific Computing and Imaging group at the
University of Utah and worked at both Evans and Sutherland and
Parametric Technologies. He is interested in most aspects of computer
graphics and most of his publications are available online
at http://research.microsoft.com/~ppsloan/.