stephan mantler More »

DirectX 11: conservative oDepth

The following part of a Gamasutra article was brought to my attention: Traditionally, IHVs have had to disable Z acceleration structures and algorithms when shaders write to the depth buffer via the oDepth register. The conservative oDepth feature in DirectX 11 enables shaders to write to the depth buffer within a specified region guarantee. This enables [...]

What I do at work

On the past weekend, the Neuen Messe Stuttgart opened with an exhibition unter the motto “Innovation meets emotion“. We had the opportunity to showcase our bike simulator there at the exhibit stand of the MFG. The visitors could use the computer controlled ergometer to climb real, GPS-measured mountain roads on a road bike; the resistance [...]

What you really don’t want to see a few hours before a deadline

…is a complete crash of your development system, right back to the BIOS self-test (no blue screen), followed by disk corruption errors that keep scrolling over your screen for several hours. Well, that pretty much put the nail in the coffin of our submission plans, and we decided to go for the next deadline (which is, [...]

Visual Debugging

For my shader I need to calculate tangent space view directions - since in my case the tangent frame is constant over the entire surface, it is straightforward to do this in the vertex shader and let the hardware interpolate (linearly) over the surface. Of course this isn’t numerically exact, but I was wondering how [...]

DirectX10

Just found some initial information on DirectX10 and Windows Vista. Interesting read. The fact that GDI/GDI+ will not be hardware accelerated doesn’t make me happy thinking about OpenGL. Then again, apparently Vista will ship with DirectX9 as well (which will provide backwards compatibility), so one could assume that OpenGL will be supported in a similar [...]