Dynamic Resolution Rendering

The Dynamic Resolution Rendering sample demonstrates a technique for dynamically adjusting the resolution of the main rendering, with graphical user interface components drawn at the native resolution. This technique can help developers achieve their quality and performance goals on a wide range of hardware and scene profiles. The sample also shows how the addition of scaling filters such as velocity aware temporal spatial anti-aliasing can enhance quality.

Read: Dynamic Resolution Rendering
Blog Post: Dynamic Resolution Rendering Sample Now Live - Blog post by Doug Binks

Morphological Antialiasing

MLAA is an image-based, post-process filtering technique which identifies discontinuity patterns and blends colors in the neighborhood of these patterns to perform effective anti-aliasing. It is the precursor of a new generation of real-time antialiasing techniques that rival MSAA. This sample is based on the original, CPU-based MLAA implementation provided by Reshetov in 2009, with improvements to greatly increase performance. The improvements are:

o Integration of a new, efficient, easy-to-use tasking system implemented on top of Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB).
o Integration of a new, efficient, easy to use pipelining system for CPU onloading of graphics tasks.
o Improvement of data access patterns through a new transposing pass.
o Increased use of Intel® SSE instructions to optimize discontinuities detection and color blending.

Game Engine Tasking - Animation

Desktop gaming systems with 6 cores and 12 hardware threads have been on the market for some time now and 4 core CPUs are becoming increasingly common even on laptops. To give your customers the best experience on their particular platform we want to write game engine code that is core count independent. Tasking allows programs to benefit from scaling as core counts are increased; giving our users a great game experience consistent with their choice of hardware. In this sample we will convert a single-threaded animation system into a tasking animation system. There is small API the application uses for Tasking and internally that uses Intel TBB, but that usage could be replaced with whatever threading system was convenient.

GPU Detect

GPU Detect is a short sample demonstrates a way to detect the primary graphics hardware present in a system, and to initialize a game’s default fidelity presets based on the found graphics device using a simple API. The code download includes documentation and is meant to be used as a guideline, and should be adapted to the game’s specific needs.

Shadow Explorer

Shadow Explorer is a sample application, with source code, that allows developers to work with several shadowing techniques, examine the performance versus quality tradeoffs of each one, and discover which is best suited for their game. In this first version of Shadow Explorer, we include four algorithms for evaluation: simple shadow maps, percentage closer shadow maps, variance shadow maps and exponential variance shadow maps. Each method is optimized for performance and exposes several variables, which allow the developer to further refine the technique in real time. Additionally, two scenes are provided to enable the developer to explore the strengths of each technique on different types of geometry.

Updated 7/14/2011: EVSM updates to respond to developer feedback.

Onloaded Shadows

Onloaded Shadows is a technique by which shadow maps can be calculated asynchronously on the CPU. By using cascades, the shadow map for objects near the camera are calculated every frame on the GPU, but the shadow maps for objects in the second cascade and beyond are calculated less often on the CPU. This allows for better work balancing across the CPU and GPU.

Colony - A highly parallel crowd simulation technique

Colony is a highly parallel optimized crowd simulation technique. Tens of thousands of units are simulated using a novel ray-casting technique. This is achieved by utilizing TBB to distribute our work across multiple threads and multiple frames and utilizing SIMD to ensure further instruction-level parallelism. The source package has been updated with instrumentation for Intel® GPA 4.0. Run the Profile build and capture a trace for Intel® GPA Platform Analyzer and see how the work is distributed across all the cores.

Updated Source: May 24, 2011

Read: Threaded Crowd Simulation with Collision Avoidance
Blog Post: A Game That Plays Itself