Advanced CG for
Game Engines @ NCSU

at 6:26 PM

Bottom line: xb1 is 50 % slower than ps4, lower power, targets a broader market. Memory also slower.

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// published on AnandTech // visit site

It's that time of decade again. Time for a new Xbox. It took four years for Microsoft to go from the original Xbox to the Xbox 360. The transition from Xbox 360 to the newly announced Xbox One will take right around 8 years, and the 360 won't be going away anytime soon either. The console business demands long upgrade cycles in order to make early investments in hardware (often sold at a loss) worthwhile. This last round was much longer that it ever should have been, so the Xbox One arrives to a very welcoming crowd.

Yesterday Microsoft finally took the covers off the new Xbox, what it hopes will last for many years to come. While Microsoft was light on technical details, I believe we have enough to put together some decent analysis. Let's get to it.

Visit website

at 7:40 PM

The integration is a bigger deal than most realize. Consoles may leapfrog pc performance after all.

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site

Lots of numbers. Not many details.

Compared to Sony's earlier PlayStation 4 reveal, Microsoft's Xbox One event has been light on technical details so far. Of the rumors that were flying around before the event, Microsoft has only confirmed a few of them: the new console will have 8GB of RAM, USB 3.0 ports, built-in 802.11n, and support for Wi-Fi Direct.

The reveal has also been big on buzzwords like "5 billion transistors" and "native 64-bit architecture" that don't really mean much without any context, but Wired's Gadget Lab has some more information for us: much like the PlayStation 4, the One uses a custom-designed APU from AMD (hence, 64-bit), and this APU apparently brings the CPU cores, the GPU, the memory, and the other necessary controller chips into a single 40nm SoC (hence the sky-high transistor count).

And, finally, the Xbox One includes a Blu-ray drive, a piece of Sony-backed technology that never made it to the 360. For a brief time, Microsoft sold an HD DVD add-on drive for the 360, but that format's eventual failure left the 360 reliant on its standard DVD drive for the rest of its life cycle.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs

at 7:31 PM

Better gestures, voice. Not sure what graphics is in there yet.

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site

Microsoft officially announced its next-generation video game console, the Xbox One, at a press event held at its campus in Redmond, Washington today.

In terms of hardware, the new console has "5 billion transistors," 8GB of RAM, a 64-bit architecture, USB 3.0, a Blu-ray player, and "variable power states." Microsoft also announced a new Kinect sensor that supports more conversational speech and is more sensitive to gestures, which will be an integral component in the new Xbox experience. The new Xbox One controller has updated ergonomics, an integrated battery department, and a redesigned D-pad joystick.

Microsoft also emphasized the new importance of Smart Glass, the app that allows third-party smartphones or tablets to act as remote controls. The company noted that the app will work with the Xbox One natively for a "lag-free and complete experience."

Read 8 remaining paragraphs

at 7:08 AM

Via the vxlab's student Adam Marrs.

---

Begin forwarded message:

This would have made life easier a few months ago...

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/192654/Unitys_mobile_licenses_are_now_free.php

at 7:37 PM

The mobile engine competition heats up.

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Battlefield_3_-_aftermath_-_epicenter_2_large

EA has long been said to be working on a mobile version for its Frostbite engine, and now the company has posted information about the effort online. The Frostbite page officially reveals the existence of Frostbite Go, a "mobile division" meant to allow Frostbite-based games. While it says the Frostbite Go project will target "all major mobile platforms," only iOS and Android are mentioned specifically. The company was hiring mobile developers last year, and an EA / Dice project manager mentioned a mobile team called Frostbite Go in April. Epic — whose mobile version of Unreal Engine 3 powers popular iOS game Infinity Blade — has long led the pack in bringing AAA engines to mobile platforms, but EA and Crytek have both previously...

at 4:56 PM

Thar shield blows!

And game streaming too!

Methinks there is more here than others think.

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// published on AnandTech // visit site

It has been a while since we last heard from NVIDIA about Project Shield. Today, NVIDIA is dropping "Project" from the name, making it formally just Shield, and simultaneously announcing pricing and availability information about its Tegra 4-packing handheld gaming console. The specs for Shield remain the same as what we saw at CES 2013 — 1.9 GHz Tegra 4 SoC, 5-inch 720p display, and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. What's nice about getting a device straight from the SoC vendor in this case is that NVIDIA promises it will be able to push out OTA updates with the latest and greatest Android version basically in lock step with its own official Tegra 4 BSP (Board Support Package) software offerings, which makes it essentially the Tegra 4 reference platform.

NVIDIA SHIELD
	Shield
SoC	NVIDIA Tegra 4 - 1.9 GHz
Display	5-inch 720p "Retinal" Display
RAM	2 GB LPDDR3
Wireless Connectivity	2x2:2 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi + BT 3.0, GPS
Storage	16 GB NAND, microSD Expansion
I/O	microUSB 2.0, mini-HDMI, 3.5mm headphone
OS	Android 4.2.1, Updates from NVIDIA
Price	$349.00, Preorders May 20, Shipping Late June

As for availability, the big news is pricing, which will be $349 in the US, with preorders starting on May 20th from vendors familiar to everyone. NVIDIA called out Newegg, GameStop, Micro Center, and Canada Computers explicitly as preorder vendors, with others to follow after the preorder period. As for ship date, NVIDIA is aiming for late June for fulfillment. At $349 the Shield is more expensive than the major first party handheld gaming consoles like the Sony PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS, but an impressive middle ground and price point nonetheless for basically what boils down to a higher-end smartphone sans cellular stack but with a built in gamepad. We're excited to get hands on with Shield in its final form with the final tuning of its joysticks, triggers, and D-Pad.

In conjunction with the launch of Shield will be availability of the PC game streaming functionality as well, initially in beta form. NVIDIA has a set of recommended titles which have been optimized for the Shield controller scheme, and as we experienced at CES likely include UI tweaks to make 720p handheld gaming a reality.

Source: NVIDIA Blog (Shield)

at 5:11 PM

Unity Engine 4 will let devs "do so much more with so much less"

A shot of Unity 4's new Mecanim animation interface.

AAA developers with deep pockets are no doubt looking forward to the many gorgeous upgrades available in the upcoming Unreal Engine 4. But smaller independent developers will probably be more excited about the new features for Unity's just announced Unity Engine 4.

The new version of Unity fully integrates new animation tools from Mecanim, a Canadian company that Unity acquired last year. This brings skill from experienced animators who have worked with major publishers including EA and Ubisoft. Besides improving computational efficiency and increasing Unity's limit on simultaneously animated characters from dozens to "hundreds" at once, Unity President Dave Helgason stressed that the Mecanim system makes animation much simpler for developers.

"Things that would normally take several hours or even days to do—taking the animation data, making sure it fits the character, timing the motion extracts and making sure it all loops correctly—now that's all automatic so it's literally minutes... you can do so much more with so much less," Helgason told Ars. Users will also be able to buy canned animations from the Unity Asset Store, dropping fully animated characters into their projects unedited, or diving in deep to play with the underlying blend trees and state machines if they want.

at 5:51 PM

Crytek CEO quietly confident after Unreal Engine 4 reveal

EA / Crytek

Crytek CEO and founder Cevat Yerli has a lot to be proud of. In just over a decade, his company has gone from a personal hobby to a major player in the game industry. Not only have its first-person franchises like Far Cry and Crysis become synonymous with top-of-the-line graphics, but its CryEngine 3 is being licensed for major upcoming projects including MechWarrior Online and the next game from Left 4 Dead developer Turtle Rock. The company is also investing heavily in the growing free-to-play first-person shooter market with Warface.

But Crytek faces significant challenges as well. While CryEngine 3 continues to be licensed by high-profile games, architectural firms and even the United States Army, the Unreal Engine has much deeper penetration in the video game space and drew considerable attention with the recent reveal of Unreal Engine 4. And while Warface is successful abroad, it is untested in the North American market.

Yet when I talked to Yerli at E3, he came across as one of the most relaxed people at the entire show. Perhaps it was just exhaustion, but he wore a consistent smile, laughed readily, and didn't seem at all like someone facing down threats from all sides.

at 10:12 AM

Seems they do the graphics in Android and Chrome. Via our former faculty member David McAllister.
Benjamin Watson
Director, Design Graphics Lab | Associate Professor, Computer Science, NC State Univ.

919-513-0325 | designgraphics.ncsu.edu | @dgllab

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David McAllister <davidm@cmonline.com>
Date: Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 9:56 AM
Subject: Fwd: [CS-Alumni] Jobs: Graphics & infrastructure positions at Google

Begin forwarded message:

Date: June 8, 2012 9:55:34 AM EDT
Cc: Tom Hudson <tomhudson@google.com>
Subject: [CS-Alumni] Jobs: Graphics & infrastructure positions at Google

Since we're all posting positions: Google would really, really like to hire several more people to do low-level graphics work in our Chapel Hill office, or to help with build/performance/tools infrastructure to support the team here. Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, OpenGL, DirectX all welcome. We're still looking for a good computational geometer and an assembly-language (SSE / Neon) hacker.
We may not be the "minutes from the beach" that Z can advertise, but we're minutes from your alma mater and the Southern Part of Heaven. Most of the pixels drawn by Chrome and Android are drawn by our code, which means your RGBs show up in front of a plurality of web & smartphone users in the world.

Tom
tomhudson@google.com

at 6:29 AM

It's all about making designers more productive.

Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

Enlarge

Epic Games

"I light my level by dropping a sun in."

That statement from Epic Games' Senior Technical Artist and Level Designer Alan Willard doesn't seem like such a big deal on the surface. To a non-programmer, it probably sounds like the blindingly simple and obvious way to add light to a three-dimensional environment ("Computer, drop in a sun, please. And make me some tea, Earl Grey, hot.") But to anyone who has worked with an existing game engine, including Epic's incredibly popular but six-year-old Unreal Engine 3, the ability to simply "drop in a sun" using the upcoming Unreal Engine 4 is a major improvement over the current status quo.

"I don't have to go through and place a ton of lights and process those down into light maps, so just from an iteration standpoint, the engine is able to be worked with at a much higher speed," Willard continues. "I can just begin placing things and they look like I spent three days tweaking the lighting to make it look like that."

at 10:29 PM

New Open-Access Computer Graphics Journal

After talking about open access so much, it feels great to finally be doing something about it! Eric and I are both on the founding editorial board for the Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT), a new peer-reviewed computer graphics journal which is open access, has no author fees, and is practice-focused (in the spirit of the Journal of Graphics Tools).

Similar to other journal “declarations of independence”, the JCGT was founded by the resigning editorial board of the Journal of Graphics Tools (JGT). Initially created as a “spiritual successor” to the Graphics Gems series of books, JGT had a unique focus on practical graphics techniques and insights, which is being continued at JCGT.

With Morgan McGuire (the editor-in-chief) and the rest of the editorial board, we plan to leverage this illustrious history, our expertise, and the advantages of online self-publishing and open access to create a truly exceptional journal. But we need your help. Like any journal, JCGT can only be as good as the papers submitted to it.

If you are a researcher, we hope the pedigree of the editorial board, the increase in impact afforded by open access, the lack of author fees, and the streamlined process will make JCGT compelling to you as a publication venue.

We also want to reach out to industry practitioners (especially game developers) who would not typically consider publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Similarly to its predecessor, JCGT emphasizes practicality and reproducibility over novelty and theory, and the papers differ from the typical “research paper” style (lengthy “related work”, “conclusion” or “future work” sections are not required). There are also many advantages to publishing in JCGT vs. more traditional industry channels such as trade conferences, magazines, books, and blog posts. The open access format guarantees wide and immediate distribution, and the peer-review process will provide valuable insights and comments on your work from some of the top experts in the field as well as assure potential readers of the high quality of the work.

Open access to research: an idea whose time has come. Be a part of it!

at 10:22 PM

Seven Things for June 7th

I’ll be gone this weekend, so my dream of catching up on resources by posting every day is slowed a bit. Here’s today’s seven:

The free Process Explorer has a lot more functionality than its name implies. One very cool feature is that it actually shows GPU usage. Run it, right-click a process that’s running and select Properties, then go to the GPU Graph tab to watch memory use and GPU load.

If you are seriously involved in implementing bump maps, parallax occlusion maps, etc., Morton Mikkelsen’s blog has a lot of chewy information, along with demos and source. He’s doing a lot of interesting work on autogenerating and blending mappings.

The game itself is no great shakes, but Google’s Cube has some lovely 3D rendering going on via javascript.

Another “3D in the browser” experiment (with WebGL) is sketchPatch. It’s not as simple as advertised, but I like the idea of an interpreted language you just type and see in the same window.

There are lots of reasons Unreal Engine 3 is the most popular commercial 3D engine for games. Here’s some nice eye candy from their tutorial on image reflection, which is also just plain educational.

Some cool results here using cone tracing for global illumination effects. Seeing these effects for dynamic objects at interactive rates is great stuff, especially since they’re having to update octrees on the fly.

I love the colored Japanese woodcuts of classic videogames that Jed Henry has been making:

at 5:46 PM

Seven Things for June 6th

It’s D-Day and it’s been awhile, so let’s get going. This is a LIFO of the 486 backlogged links I’ve collected for this blog:

GPUView looks like an interesting profiling tool from some students at Stanford (done as interns at Microsoft, which has a more official page), though I’ve heard it’s a bit of work to set up. If you’ve used it, how did you find it?

Open source code for a fast and scalable GLSL GPU implementation of the Perlin noise with functions, not textures.

NV Path Rendering is not what you might think, it’s about rendering text and 2D paths with quite a bit of elaboration available (think SVG or other 2D vector descriptions). GTC presentation here.

The book “Physically Based Rendering” is now in eBook form, including PDF (so I assume no DRM?). Annoyingly, it costs considerably more than the physical book on Amazon, but that’s the publisher’s doing.

Proland looked intriguing, a procedural terrain generator that creates based on view. Appears fairly elaborate, and a quick way to get some plausible-looking terrain data.

Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmarking system; from what I’ve heard, mobile platforms kind of set the clock back a fair number of year in terms of performance. Still, 3D is doable (it certainly was in 2002); here’s a starter list of 3D CAD apps for Android (many are on the iPad, too). I need to search out more, I’m interested in what’s out there.

Finally, in the category “this looks like a painting but is reality”, a photo taken in Namibia:

at 5:28 PM

Hey, gwyneth tweets! I guess epic is in iron man 3.

Psst, ‘Iron Man 3’ is filming in Cary. Don’t tell anyone

Dozens of fans gathered for a second day Tuesday outside the Epic Games office building behind Cary Crossroads in hopes of seeing a few movie stars. They didn?t. But they?re…

at 5:14 PM

Icarus Studios announces merger

Cary-based video game company Icarus Studios has merged with a smaller business, Zabu Studio of California, to create a new game company called MFV.

Cary will serve as MFV's headquarters but Zabu CEO Milton Soong will be the chief executive of the combined company. Icarus CEO Phil Hall is remaining with the business as chief operating officer, said spokeswoman Tricia Jenkins.

The combined business has 46 employees -- 37 from Icarus and 9 from Zabu, Jenkins said.

"The formation of MFV creates a very strong alliance, combining a veteran team with cutting-edge technology and intellectual property licenses," Soong said in a prepared statement.

New Jersey's National Entertainment Collectibles Association is majority owner of MFV. National Entertainment acquired a major stake in Icarus last year, a move that also triggered the spin-off of Cary video-game business Fallen Earth as an independent company.

MFV's first project is HeroClix TabApp, a version of its HeroClix online game designed for the iPad. HeroClix Online is, in turn, a video version of the HeroClix board game that features comic book heroes.

A deal announced with Marvel announced this week calls for a half-dozen superheroes -- including Captain America, Iron Man and Thor -- to be featured in HeroClix TabApp, Jenkins said.

at 5:44 AM

Gaming over the Internet for mobiles and tvs.

Nvidia CEO: GeForce Grid 'will do for video games what cable television did for video'

Nvidia CEO GeForce Grid Gaikai stock 1024 cloud gaming

"The skiing industry would be a lot larger if you could just go do it," explains Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. There isn't a ski pole in sight: it's a metaphor for how he wants to expand the reach of video games to entirely new audiences. Two weeks ago, at the company's GPU Technology Conference, Huang introduced a new technology on stage: a GPU called GeForce Grid, specifically designed to stream video games to any smartphone, tablet, PC, or app-savvy TV. Today, however, at the company's annual investor meeting, Huang has revealed that his company is looking to make graphically potent games more portable and convenient for everyone, not just existing players. "The entire video game market is still relatively small," he says, telling us...

at 4:59 AM

If this is bad, what about quad hd or quad^2 hd? We're going to have trouble scaling rendering very far above hd.

Is the Retina display holding back iPad graphics?

The new iPad's Retina display is certainly a sight to behold, but does it come at a cost? That's the impression you'd get from viewing screenshots of Gameloft's new shooter N.O.V.A. 3 over at NeoGAF — the results suggest that the developers have seriously dialed back the effects on Apple's latest tablet in order to push four times as many pixels. The A5X system-on-chip inside the new iPad is more than capable on paper, but what happens when its quad-core GPU is tasked with running a modern first-person shooter at 2048 x 1536? We took a look at N.O.V.A. 3 and some more of the iPad's most taxing games to see how this year's model stacks up to its predecessor.

at 3:59 AM

We can see the difference: consider 600 dpi printers.

LG's 5-inch 1080p smartphone display goes far beyond Retina pixel density

Apparently not content with the 1024 x 768 resolution on its 5-inch Optimus Vu, LG is working on a 5-inch 1080p smartphone display for the second half of 2012. The 1920 x 1080 touchscreen offers a wonderfully excessive pixel density of 440 ppi, which is 72 percent more pixels per inch than the Optimus Vu, and a third more than the display on the iPhone 4S. Unlike the display on LG’s current 5-inch phone, the new screen will have the same 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio as the HDTV in your living room. The display technology is the same IPS-based LCD that LG has offered in recent devices like the Nitro HD and aforementioned Optimus Vu, but with the added benefit of many, many more pixels. If you're eager to get an early look at the...

at 3:43 AM

Pixels start going exponential.

The future of TV as seen in Super Hi-Vision

Nippon Housou Kyoukai, better known as NHK, is much more than Japan's public service broadcaster — it's a national institution that seeks to push forward major advances in televisual technology worldwide. This month the NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories is exhibiting prototype examples of the innovations it expects to see in our living rooms in the 2020s, 30s, and beyond, ranging from impossible leaps in screen size and resolution to breathtaking breakthroughs in 3D imagery. It's a head-spinning display of the presently unattainable that leaves us decidedly unimpressed with our own 1080p 3D sets. Read on to find out exactly how you'll be watching TV in the future.

at 7:17 PM

Whoa. I was doing hmds back in 95.

'Doom 3' in virtual reality: we check out John Carmack's prototype head mounted display

Id Software has just announced Doom 3 BFG Edition, a "director's cut" of the 2004 first-person shooter with new missions as well as refined visuals and gameplay mechanics — including a flashlight on the vest so you can have light while you shoot. But buried in the press release, there's one line in particular worth paying attention to: new support for 3D TVs and head mounted displays. Those who follow John Carmack on Twitter might have noticed his recent obsession over the last six months with head mounted displays. We flew down to Dallas to check out the culmination of this newfound passion — a modified "Oculus Rift" head mounted display locked. Carmack himself invited us into his self-described "mad scientist lair" — video...

at 4:28 PM

Unreal Engine 4 will bring us beautiful games faster than ever

Ars Technica

Wired

A select group of people got a private demo of Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 at the Game Developers Conference in March, and Stu Horvath of Ars Technica's sister publication Wired was one of the lucky few. UE4 has many new features that will let it continue to sit on the Throne of Games (Engines), though Wired hints that old console hardware may hinder its crack at progress.

The most recently released version of Epic Games' engine, Unreal Engine 3, powered the game Gears of War released in 2006. Since then, it's been an unstoppable force behind over 150 games, including the Mass Effect trilogy, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Mirror's Edge, and Borderlands.

One of the distinct properties of UE4 is its ability to create and display effects based on the inherent properties of an environment, rather than displaying pre-programmed ones based on anticipated scenarios. For example, light that travels through water would refract, and a character that stands in a mirror would see a reflection of themselves, not a pre-programmed image or pre-rendered character standing on the other side. This natural behavior presumably creates much less work for developers—rather than having to explicitly teach everything how to react to every individual stimulus, objects have inherent behaviors and know what to do.

Ash particles drift through a scene rendered with Unreal Engine 4.

Wired

Another one of UE4's desirable new features is its particle effects, or the ability to render hordes of tiny objects and all of their erratic motions. In the demo shown at GDC, onlookers saw the engine's ability to render many pieces of ash floating in the air, and dust particles floating in the light of a flashlight in a dark room. Normally, having to render the odd and easily affected paths of particles brings processors to their knees, but with UE4 running on an NVIDIA Kepler GTX 680, they drifted without effort.

at 6:49 PM

avalanchestudios.se/eng/blog/

at 6:28 PM

Including some general optimization techniques.

PrePrint: Performance and Power Consumption Characterization of 3D Mobile Games

IEEE Computer

This paper describes a preliminary performance and power consumption characterization study on 3D mobile games. We choose Quake3 and XRace as the game benchmarks and study them on TI OMAP3430, Qualcomm Snapdragon S2, and NVIDIA Tegra 2 (three mainstream mobile System-on-Chip architectures) by selectively disabling different graphics pipeline stages in source code level. Our characterization results show that the geometry stage is the leading bottleneck and the game logic (application) takes a significant portion of power consumption.

at 8:07 PM

Very fast low power, probably worth it for the enthusiast.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Review: Ultra Expensive, Ultra Rare, Ultra Fast

AnandTech

In an unusual move, NVIDIA took the opportunity earlier this week to announce a new 600 series video card before they would be shipping it. Based on a pair of Kepler GK104 GPUs, the GeForce GTX 690 would be NVIDIA’s new flagship dual-GPU video card. And by all metrics it would be a doozy.

Packing a pair of high clocked, fully enabled GK104 GPUs, NVIDIA was targeting GTX 680 SLI performance in a single card, the kind dual-GPU card we haven’t seen in quite some time. GTX 690 would be a no compromise card – quieter and less power hungry than GTX 680 SLI, as fast as GTX 680 in single-GPU performance, and as fast as GTX 680 SLI in multi-GPU performance. And at $999 it would be the most expensive GeForce card yet.

After the announcement and based on the specs it was clear that GTX 690 had the potential, but could NVIDIA really pull this off? They could, and they did. Now let’s see how they did it.

at 7:47 PM

Looks very good.

NVIDIA Unveils GeForce GTX 690: Dual GK104 Flagship Launching May 3rd

AnandTech

As we mentioned back on Monday, NVIDIA was going to be making some kind of GeForce announcement this evening at the NVIDA Gaming Festival 2012 in Shanghai, China. NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has just finished his speech, announcing NVIDIA’s next ultra-premium video card, the GeForce GTX 690.
Launching later this week, the GeForce GTX 690 will be NVIDIA’s new dual-GPU flagship video card, complementing their existing single-GPU GeForce GTX 680. Equipped with a pair of fully enabled GK104 GPUs, NVIDIA is shooting for GTX 680 SLI performance on a single card, and with GTX 690 they just might get there. We won’t be publishing our review until Thursday, but in the meantime let’s take a look at what we know so far about the GTX 690.

at 6:15 PM

A new home for SketchUp

Google SketchUp

In its time at Google, SketchUp has become one of the most popular 3D modeling tools in the world. With over 30 million SketchUp activations in just the last year, we’re awfully proud of our accomplishments. But there’s still so much we want to do, and we think we’ve found a way forward that will benefit everyone—our product, our team and especially our millions of users.

That’s why I’m sharing today that the SketchUp team and technology will be leaving Google to join Trimble. We’ll be better able to focus on our core communities: modelers who have been with us from the beginning, as well as future SketchUppers who have yet to discover our products. Designers, builders and makers of things have always been the heart and soul of SketchUp. With Trimble’s commitment to invest in our growth, we’ll be able to innovate and develop new features better than ever before.

#more

For those of you in the architecture, engineering and construction industries, the knowledge and experience Trimble will add to the SketchUp effort are obvious. Together with our new colleagues at Trimble, we plan to continue making our tools for the building professions as innovative, intuitive and (dare I say) fun to use as we always have.

If you’re one of the many, many people who use SketchUp for something else—from education to woodworking, geo-modeling to movie-making—rest assured that there will be a SketchUp for you, too. Our mission has always been to make 3D modeling tools that anyone can use. The free version of SketchUp is an important part of our world as well, and that isn’t changing in the least.

Thanks to Google, more people than we ever imagined possible have been introduced to SketchUp. Thanks to Trimble, we’ll be able to continue to make SketchUp into the tool that we—and you—have always hoped it would become. With a strong wind at our backs and plenty of sunshine ahead, this voyage just keeps getting more exciting.

Posted by John Bacus, Product Manager, SketchUp

at 6:29 AM

NVIDIA Plots Mobile SoC GPU Performance, Surpassing Xbox 360 by 2014

AnandTech

Qualcomm was the first to tell us that it expects to offer console level GPU performance in the not too distant future, generally hinting that its Adreno 3xx GPUs would get us there. NVIDIA shared this slide (pictured above) with us today that gives its take on where PC, console and mobile GPU performance will land over the coming years. There's nothing too revolutionary here but it does provide an interesting visual for much of what the GPU vendors have been talking about for the past couple of years.

The solid lines are estimated performance, while the dotted lines are trends. According to NVIDIA, somewhere in the 2013 - 2014 timeframe is when we'll get Xbox 360-class GPU performance out of mobile SoCs. The console line only has two points (Xbox 1 and Xbox 360), while the mobile line starts with the original iPhone, moves up to Tegra 2 and then follows Tegra 3.

at 12:06 PM

Folks, a former student of mine has a few job opportunities at ARA locally.

Best,

Ben

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christopher Sexton ARA/SED <csexton@ara.com>

Hi Ben –

Our company is doing some hiring right now, specifically in the group that I work in. If you’ve got any bright students looking for full time jobs after graduation, I’d love to talk to them.

Specifically, I’m involved with the hiring for 3 postings: SED-2012-101, SED-2012-112 and SED-2012-113.

http://www.ara.com/Careers/ara-job-search.htm

Here’s a short blurb – we’re hiring at a few different levels (junior entry to more experienced).

Applied Research Associates, Inc. (ARA), a national leader in scientific and engineering research and development, is seeking a staff software developer to join our Decision Systems Group in Raleigh, NC. The selected candidate will develop, code, test, and debug new software or enhancements to existing software under direction from senior developers/engineers. Our development approach fosters communication and collaboration across multiple scientific disciplines, and provides all members of our teams opportunities to contribute creatively to our projects. The successful applicant must have skills in analysis and design of software components in an object-oriented environment. This position supports ARA’s growing work in application development for national vulnerability and event analysis.

Position Requirements:

Understanding of the application development life cycle
Proficient with C++, Java, and object-oriented analysis & design (OOAD)
Possession of an Active DoD Secret Security Clearance or the ability to obtain one
Strong oral presentation and written communication skills

Position Preferences:

Knowledge of and experience working in a Scrum and/or XP software development environment
Experience developing Qt and/or MFC GUIs
Experience using modern software configuration management tools (e.g., Rational ClearCase, SVN, Git)
Experience using OpenSceneGraph and/or OpenGL
Experience with GIS Toolkits
Experience using XML SDKs
Experience in physics-based modeling, simulation, or distributed component technologies

http://intranet.ara.com/tools/docs/Logocircle.jpg" width="55" />

Chris G Sexton

Staff Software Developer

Applied Research Associates, Inc.

office: 919.582.3300, direct: 919.582.3318

at 9:16 AM

Hey folks,

If you go to our lecture notes page, you'll find that the pencasts I've made so far for this class are up. These let you listen to what I say and watch what I write during lecture. You'll need Acrobat Reader 10.x to listen.

Have fun!

Best,

Ben

at 12:25 PM

Hey folks,

On Wednesday we'll read more about GPUs and optimization. Please read the papers by Woolley and Garland and Kirk at our wiki site.

Adam will lead discussion of whichever paper he likes!

Best,

Ben

at 7:29 PM

Good move.

Epic Games working on a PC exclusive, wants fans to 'encourage' it to make more

The Verge - All Posts

Epic Games creative lead Cliff Bleszinski and president Mike Capps revealed today at PAX East that they are working on a PC exclusive title, Joystiq reports — and Capps confirmed the effort today in a comment left over at Polygon, saying that "we're very happy to be making a PC-focused title... making PC games is fun." Capps says that people should tell them if they want to see more PC titles, and that this new title "came from listening to our fans" — "that's a great feeling and it really impacts us and our plans." Nothing else about the game has been announced, but if Epic decides to push the boundaries, a PC-only game could utilize graphics horsepower that's leaps and bounds ahead of current-gen consoles. Be sure to head on over...

at 6:43 PM

Wii continues its tradition of being one gen behind.

Wii U graphical power about on par with Xbox 360 and PS3, suggest developers

The Verge - All Posts

There's been a lot of chatter lately about Sony and Microsoft's rumored next-generation consoles, but the only company that actually announced its next hardware is Nintendo. In our time spent with the Wii U, it's obvious this console packs far more graphics power than its predecessor, and appears to be on par with the Xbox 360 or PS3. However, we're starting to hear conflicting reports as to just how the Wii U stacks up. Several anonymous developers have told Gamesindustry International that the Wii U is less powerful than the aging Xbox 360 and PS3. One source said "some things are better, mostly as a result of it being a more modern design. But overall the Wii U just can't quite keep up."

Countering that opinion is Marvin Donald of...

at 8:48 AM

Hey folks,

For our readings on Monday, we'll look at the Kajiya and Tokuyoshi papers from our global illumination wiki. Matt and Hilay will present.

Best,

Ben

at 5:47 AM

The new nvidia architecture debuts.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown

AnandTech

“How do you follow up on Fermi?” That’s the question we had going into NVIDIA’s press briefing for the GeForce GTX 680 and the Kepler architecture earlier this month. With Fermi NVIDIA not only captured the performance crown for gaming, but they managed to further build on their success in the professional markets with Tesla and Quadro. Though it was a very clearly a rough start for NVIDIA, Fermi ended up doing quite well in the end.

So how do you follow up on Fermi? As it turns out, you follow it up with something that is in many ways more of the same. With a focus on efficiency, NVIDIA has stripped Fermi down to the core and then built it back up again; reducing power consumption and die size alike, all while maintaining most of the aspects we’ve come to know with Fermi. The end result of which is NVIDIA’s next generation GPU architecture: Kepler.

Launching today is the GeForce GTX 680, at the heart of which is NVIDIA’s new GK104 GPU, based on their equally new Kepler architecture. As we’ll see, not only has NVIDIA retaken the performance crown with the GeForce GTX 680, but they have done so in a manner truly befitting of their drive for efficiency.

at 8:56 PM

Hey folks,

For our readings on Monday, we'll read the first two papers on our ambient occlusion wiki, by Bunnell and Mittring. Raviteja and Ian will lead discussion.

See you soon....

Ben.

at 7:46 AM

Always interested in global illumination acceleration, and Chalmers has done lots of perceptual work.

A Significance Cache for Accelerating Global Illumination

CG Forum

Abstract

Rendering using physically based methods requires substantial computational resources. Most methods that are physically based use straightforward techniques that may excessively compute certain types of light transport, while ignoring more important ones. Importance sampling is an effective and commonly used technique to reduce variance in such methods. Most current approaches for physically based rendering based on Monte Carlo methods sample the BRDF and cosine term, but are unable to sample the indirect illumination as this is the term that is being computed. Knowledge of the incoming illumination can be especially useful in the case of hard to find light paths, such as caustics or scenes which rely primarily on indirect illumination. To facilitate the determination of such paths, we propose a caching scheme which stores important directions, and is analytically sampled to calculate important paths. Results show an improvement over BRDF sampling and similar illumination importance sampling.

at 11:47 PM

Nice images of different display layouts.

The iPad's Retina Display goes under the microscope in screen comparison

The Verge - All Posts

New iPad and iPad 3 screen comparison from Lukas Mathis

Before Apple's latest iPad was announced, we saw some early comparisons of an unpowered version of the device's display panel. Now that the iPad is out, the logical next step was to do the same with the real deal, and UI designer Lukas Mathis has taken on the challenge, comparing the display's pixels to several other devices on his blog. Using a USB microscope, Mathis examined the quadrupled pixel count on the new iPad, while also putting it up against the iPad 2, iPhone 4S, Blackberry PlayBook, and the Kindle Fire, amongst many others. While obviously demonstrating the iPad's superiority on the pixel front, it's also a primer on different screen technologies themselves, from the unique pixel arrangement of the Nintendo 3DS's 3D panel,...

at 7:05 PM

I'm always interested in the visual vs temporal fidelity trade off, and this paper looks like it hits that square.

Evaluating Display Fidelity and Interaction Fidelity in a Virtual Reality Game

IEEE TVCG

In recent years, consumers have witnessed a technological revolution that has delivered more–realistic experiences in their own homes through high–definition, stereoscopic televisions and natural, gesture–based video game consoles. Although these experiences are more realistic, offering higher levels of fidelity, it is not clear how the increased display and interaction aspects of fidelity impact the user experience. Since immersive virtual reality (VR) allows us to achieve very high levels of fidelity, we designed and conducted a study that used a six–sided CAVE to evaluate display fidelity and interaction fidelity independently, at extremely high and low levels, for a VR first–person shooter (FPS) game. Our goal was to gain a better understanding of the effects of fidelity on the user in a complex, performance–intensive context. The results of our study indicate that both display and interaction fidelity significantly affect strategy and performance, as well as subjective judgments of presence, engagement, and usability. In particular, performance results were strongly in favor of two conditions: low–display, low–interaction fidelity (representative of traditional FPS games) and high–display, high–interaction fidelity (similar to the real world).

at 10:05 PM

Folks,

We'll be visited on March 28 by Daniel Wright of Epic Games. Daniel is a graduate of NC State who now works on Epic's very successful engine UE3. Daniel will speak about what he's up to at Epic a bit, then answer any questions you may have.

at 1:41 PM

Games talk.

Thursday March 15, 2012, 10:00 AM
How do we make interactive narratives and what would that even mean?
http://research.csc.ncsu.edu/colloquia/seminar-post.php?id=452

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at 5:45 AM

After analysis, anand says ipad graphics are really just 30% faster.

Analysis of the new Apple iPad

AnandTech

Yesterday Apple unveiled its third generation iPad, simply called the new iPad, at an event in San Francisco. The form factor remains mostly unchanged with a 9.7-inch display, however the new device is thicker at 9.4mm vs. 8.8mm for its predecessor. The added thickness was necessary to support the iPad's new 2048 x 1536 Retina Display.

Tablet Specification Comparison
	ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity	Apple's new iPad (2012)	Apple iPad 2
Dimensions	263 x 180.8 x 8.5mm	241.2 x 185.7 x 9.4mm	241.2 x 185.7 x 8.8mm
Display	10.1-inch 1920 x 1200 Super IPS+	9.7-inch 2048 x 1536 IPS	9.7-inch 1024 x 768 IPS
Weight (WiFi)	586g	652g	601g
Weight (4G LTE)	586g	662g	601g
Processor (WiFi)	1.6GHz NVIDIA Tegra 3 T33 (4 x Cortex A9)	Apple A5X (2 x Cortex A9, PowerVR SGX 543MP4)	1GHz Apple A5 (2 x Cortex A9, PowerVR SGX543MP2)
Processor (4G LTE)	1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 (2 x Krait)	Apple A5X (2 x Cortex A9, PowerVR SGX 543MP4)	1GHz Apple A5 (2 x Cortex A9, PowerVR SGX543MP2)
Connectivity	WiFi , Optional 4G LTE	WiFi , Optional 4G LTE	WiFi , Optional 3G
Memory	1GB	1GB	512MB
Storage	16GB - 64GB	16GB - 64GB	16GB
Battery	25Whr	42.5Whr	25Whr
Pricing	$599 - $799 est	$499 - $829	$399, $529

Driving the new display is Apple's A5X SoC. Apple hasn't been too specific about what's inside the A5X other than to say it features "quad-core graphics". Upon further prodding Apple did confirm that there are two CPU cores inside the SoC. It's safe to assume that there are still a pair of Cortex A9s in the A5X but now paired with a PowerVR SGX543MP4 instead of the 543MP2 used in the iPad 2.

Read on for our analysis of Apple's 3rd generation iPad.

at 1:29 AM

Folks,

On Monday we'll finish discussing our caustics papers. On Wednesday, we'll discuss two classic papers for helping us to create bumpy surfaces, with Hilay & Adam taking point. You'll find the papers in our wiki: one by Blinn introduces bump mapping, and another by Cook introduces displacement mapping (along with shading).

Best,

Ben

at 6:39 PM

Nice leads to web graphics tech.

1-up for web games

Google Code Blog

By David Glazer, Engineering Director, Google+

Hundreds of millions of users are already having fun playing games on the web. With GDC going on this week (#googlegdc), we wanted to give you an update on our efforts to improve the web ecosystem for game developers.

New technology capabilities

With HTML5, WebGL, and WebRTC, the browser has evolved into a feature-rich gaming platform. We are working closely with all browser vendors to further improve the web’s capabilities with new HTML5 APIs such as Gamepad, Mouse Lock, and Fullscreen.

Native Client (NaCl), a technology that enables console quality games in the browser, is also gaining traction. Starting today, the BlitzTech Gaming engine and the Havok Physics Engine have announced NaCl support, complementing a rich ecosystem of game middleware. Some of the latest games that take advantage of NaCl’s capabilities are Zombie Track Meat, Eets Munchies, Go Home Dinosaurs, Dark Legends, Air Mech, and Ubisoft’s From Dust. You can see an early preview of them at our GDC booth.

Improved distribution and monetization

Using social information in game play allows users to connect in more meaningful ways and developers to build even more compelling games. Google+ games continues to grow and attract exciting new games, including the exclusive launch of the epic fantasy title Kingdom Age last week. To help social game developers reach more users globally, all Google+ games will soon be available in the Chrome Web Store, providing an audience of hundreds of millions of users.

In addition, our In-App Payments solution recently added support for more currencies and optimized the payment flow to enable higher conversions.

Visit us at GDC and on the web

To get started working with us, you can now access a new site, developers.google.com/games, that pulls together all our technologies to help you build, distribute, promote, and monetize your games. And for those of you attending GDC this week, stop by our developer day and our booth. We are looking forward to continuing our collaboration with the gaming community and bringing the best games to hundreds of millions of Internet gamers.

David Glazer, Engineering Director for Google+ .

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

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Pixels start going exponential.

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Abstract

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