Direct3D
Texture Compression
We all know image compression from common formats like JPEG or PNG. For rendering the textures can be compressed as well, but here different formats are used than the ones we are familiar with. The reason here is that there are special requirements when it comes to texture compression: Small texture size Fast decompression Fast [...]
Book Review: GPU Pro, GPU Pro 2, GPU Pro 3
The GPU Pro book series is some kind of unofficial successor of the quite good ShaderX series. Both are edited by Wolfgang Engel and both are focused on real-time graphics programming. The first book of this series, GPU Pro, came out 2010 and presents 41 articles on 706 pages (not counting the author introduction at [...]
Shader Model and GLSL versions
When reading articles about graphics programming you come alone the term ‘Shader Model’ and version numbers for GLSL, OpenGL and Direct3D (depending on the API used in the article). While the described algorithms (nearly always) can be implemented in the ‘other’ API as well the different versioning schemes can be confusing – what OpenGL version [...]