Browsing by Author "Unterguggenberger, Johannes"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Conservative Meshlet Bounds for Robust Culling of Skinned Meshes
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Unterguggenberger, Johannes; Kerbl, Bernhard; Pernsteiner, Jakob; Wimmer, Michael; Zhang, Fang-Lue and Eisemann, Elmar and Singh, Karan
    Following recent advances in GPU hardware development and newly introduced rendering pipeline extensions, the segmentation of input geometry into small geometry clusters-so-called meshlets-has emerged as an important practice for efficient rendering of complex 3D models. Meshlets can be processed efficiently using mesh shaders on modern graphics processing units, in order to achieve streamlined geometry processing in just two tightly coupled shader stages that allow for dynamic workload manipulation in-between. The additional granularity layer between entire models and individual triangles enables new opportunities for fine-grained visibility culling methods. However, in contrast to static models, view frustum and backface culling on a per-meshlet basis for skinned, animated models are difficult to achieve while respecting the conservative spatio-temporal bounds that are required for robust rendering results. In this paper, we describe a solution for computing and exploiting relevant conservative bounds for culling meshlets of models that are animated using linear blend skinning. By enabling visibility culling for animated meshlets, our approach can help to improve rendering performance and alleviate bottlenecks in the notoriously performanceand memory-intensive skeletal animation pipelines of modern real-time graphics applications.
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    The Road to Vulkan: Teaching Modern Low-Level APIs in Introductory Graphics Courses
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Unterguggenberger, Johannes; Kerbl, Bernhard; Wimmer, Michael; Bourdin, Jean-Jacques; Paquette, Eric
    For over two decades, the OpenGL API provided users with the means for implementing versatile, feature-rich, and portable real-time graphics applications. Consequently, it has been widely adopted by practitioners and educators alike and is deeply ingrained in many curricula that teach real-time graphics for higher education. Over the years, the architecture of graphics processing units (GPUs) incrementally diverged from OpenGL's conceptual design. The more recently introduced Vulkan API provides a more modern, fine-grained approach for interfacing with the GPU. Various properties of this API and overall trends suggest that Vulkan could soon replace OpenGL in many areas. Hence, it stands to reason that educators who have their students' best interests at heart should provide them with corresponding lecture material. However, Vulkan is notoriously verbose and rather challenging for first-time users, thus transitioning to this new API bears a considerable risk of failing to achieve expected teaching goals. In this paper, we document our experiences after teaching Vulkan in an introductory graphics course side-by-side with conventional OpenGL. A final survey enables us to draw conclusions about perceived workload, difficulty, and students' acceptance of either approach and identify suitable conditions and recommendations for teaching Vulkan to undergraduate students.
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    Temporally Stable Content-Adaptive and Spatio-Temporal Shading Rate Assignment for Real-Time Applications
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Stappen, Stefan; Unterguggenberger, Johannes; Kerbl, Bernhard; Wimmer, Michael; Lee, Sung-Hee and Zollmann, Stefanie and Okabe, Makoto and Wünsche, Burkhard
    We propose two novel methods to improve the efficiency and quality of real-time rendering applications: Texel differential-based content-adaptive shading (TDCAS) and spatio-temporally filtered adaptive shading (STeFAS). Utilizing Variable Rate Shading (VRS)-a hardware feature introduced with NVIDIA's Turing micro-architecture-and properties derived during rendering or Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA), our techniques adapt the resolution to improve the performance and quality of real-time applications. VRS enables different shading resolution for different regions of the screen during a single render pass. In contrast to other techniques, TDCAS and STeFAS have very little overhead for computing the shading rate. STeFAS enables up to 4x higher rendering resolutions for similar frame rates, or a performance increase of 4× at the same resolution.