Browsing by Author "Steinberger, Markus"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    CUDA and Applications to Task-based Programming
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Kerbl, Bernhard; Kenzel, Michael; Winter, Martin; Steinberger, Markus; Hahmann, Stefanie; Patow, Gustavo A.
    Since its inception, the CUDA programming model has been continuously evolving. Because the CUDA toolkit aims to consistently expose cutting-edge capabilities for general-purpose compute jobs to its users, the added features in each new version reflect the rapid changes that we observe in GPU architectures. Over the years, the changes in hardware, growing scope of built-in functions and libraries, as well as an advancing C++ standard compliance have expanded the design choices when coding for CUDA, and significantly altered the directives to achieve peak performance. In this tutorial, we give a thorough introduction to the CUDA toolkit, demonstrate how a contemporary application can benefit from recently introduced features and how they can be applied to task-based GPU scheduling in particular. For instance, we will provide detailed examples of use cases for independent thread scheduling, cooperative groups, and the CUDA standard library, libcu++, which are certain to become an integral part of clean coding for CUDA in the near future.
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    High-Performance Graphics 2019 – Short Papers: Frontmatter
    (Eurographics Association, 2019) Steinberger, Markus; Foley, Tim; Steinberger, Markus and Foley, Tim
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    Interactive Modeling of Cellular Structures on Surfaces with Application to Additive Manufacturing
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Stadlbauer, Pascal; Mlakar, Daniel; Seidel, Hans-Peter; Steinberger, Markus; Zayer, Rhaleb; Panozzo, Daniele and Assarsson, Ulf
    The rich and evocative patterns of natural tessellations endow them with an unmistakable artistic appeal and structural properties which are echoed across design, production, and manufacturing. Unfortunately, interactive control of such patterns-as modeled by Voronoi diagrams, is limited to the simple two dimensional case and does not extend well to freeform surfaces. We present an approach for direct modeling and editing of such cellular structures on surface meshes. The overall modeling experience is driven by a set of editing primitives which are efficiently implemented on graphics hardware. We feature a novel application for 3D printing on modern support-free additive manufacturing platforms. Our method decomposes the input surface into a cellular skeletal structure which hosts a set of overlay shells. In this way, material saving can be channeled to the shells while structural stability is channeled to the skeleton. To accommodate the available printer build volume, the cellular structure can be further split into moderately sized parts. Together with shells, they can be conveniently packed to save on production time. The assembly of the printed parts is streamlined by a part numbering scheme which respects the geometric layout of the input model.
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    Meshlets and How to Shade Them: A Study on Texture-Space Shading
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2022) Neff, Thomas; Mueller, Joerg H.; Steinberger, Markus; Schmalstieg, Dieter; Chaine, Raphaëlle; Kim, Min H.
    Commonly used image-space layouts of shading points, such as used in deferred shading, are strictly view-dependent, which restricts efficient caching and temporal amortization. In contrast, texture-space layouts can represent shading on all surface points and can be tailored to the needs of a particular application. However, the best grouping of shading points-which we call a shading unit-in texture space remains unclear. Choices of shading unit granularity (how many primitives or pixels per unit) and in shading unit parametrization (how to assign texture coordinates to shading points) lead to different outcomes in terms of final image quality, overshading cost, and memory consumption. Among the possible choices, shading units consisting of larger groups of scene primitives, so-called meshlets, remain unexplored as of yet. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy for analyzing existing texture-space shading methods based on the group size and parametrization of shading units. Furthermore, we introduce a novel texture-space layout strategy that operates on large shading units: the meshlet shading atlas. We experimentally demonstrate that the meshlet shading atlas outperforms previous approaches in terms of image quality, run-time performance and temporal upsampling for a given number of fragment shader invocations. The meshlet shading atlas lends itself to work together with popular cluster-based rendering of meshes with high geometric detail.
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    Subdivision-Specialized Linear Algebra Kernels for Static and Dynamic Mesh Connectivity on the GPU
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Mlakar, Daniel; Winter, Martin; Stadlbauer, Pascal; Seidel, Hans-Peter; Steinberger, Markus; Zayer, Rhaleb; Panozzo, Daniele and Assarsson, Ulf
    Subdivision surfaces have become an invaluable asset in production environments. While progress over the last years has allowed the use of graphics hardware to meet performance demands during animation and rendering, high-performance is limited to immutable mesh connectivity scenarios. Motivated by recent progress in mesh data structures, we show how the complete Catmull-Clark subdivision scheme can be abstracted in the language of linear algebra. While this high-level formulation allows for a fully parallel implementation with significant performance gains, the underlying algebraic operations require further specialization for modern parallel hardware. Integrating domain knowledge about the mesh matrix data structure, we replace costly general linear algebra operations like matrix-matrix multiplication by specialized kernels. By further considering innate properties of Catmull-Clark subdivision, like the quad-only structure after refinement, we achieve an additional order of magnitude in performance and significantly reduce memory footprints. Our approach can be adapted seamlessly for different use cases, such as regular subdivision of dynamic meshes, fast evaluation for immutable topology and feature-adaptive subdivision for efficient rendering of animated models. In this way, patchwork solutions are avoided in favor of a streamlined solution with consistent performance gains throughout the production pipeline. The versatility of the sparse matrix linear algebra abstraction underlying our work is further demonstrated by extension to other schemes such as √3 and Loop subdivision.