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This would have been a lot better with examples in the form of rendered images or perhaps even a video. Maybe it's just my lack of background in graphics, but

by ink_13 6y ago

This would have been a lot better with examples in the form of rendered images or perhaps even a video. Maybe it's just my lack of background in graphics, but I had a lot of trouble grasping what the author was attempting to communicate without a concrete example.

eternalban 6y ago
It's about taking known 2D graphics and UI approaches which were developed for CPUs and looking at effective rendering engine architectures doing the same using GPUs. Terms such as "scene graph", "retained mode UI", etc. are those existing 2d graphics matter. So the approach, afaiu, is a data layout for the scene graph that basically is the more domain general concern of mapping graph e.g. Linked List, datastructures (that are CPU friendly) to array forms (GPU friendly) suitable for parallel treatment. Other GPU concerns, such as minimizing global traffic by local caching, and mapping thread groups to tiles. I found the idea of having the scene graph resident in GPU to be interesting. (note to author: "serialization" comes from networking roots of serializing a data structure for transmision over the net. So, definitely serial. /g)
Agentlien 6y ago
I understand where you are coming from. There is a lot of jargon and it assumes familiarity with many concepts. I think any explanatory images which would help someone unfamiliar with the field would need to be accompanied by quite a bit of explanation. One thing which I think made reading this a bit more work than necessary is that it feels like it's prattling on about a lot of tangential details and never quite gets to the point. edit: a prime example of an unnecessary aside is mentioning the warp/wavefront/subgroup terminology. I feel anyone in the target audience should know this already and it's not really relevant to what's being explained.
- skohan 6y ago
  It doesn't seem to be a finished work. I guess this is more of a journal entry on the author's initial takeaways from a week-long coding retreat.
MattRix 6y ago
It wouldn’t have been better, it just would have been more high level and generalized, but I don’t think that’s what the author was going for. I found the amount of detail refreshing, and as someone about to make a GPU based 2D display tree renderer, it was written at just the right level to be quite useful.

by ink_13 6y ago

eternalban 6y ago

It's about taking known 2D graphics and UI approaches which were developed for CPUs and looking at effective rendering engine architectures doing the same using GPUs. Terms such as "scene graph", "retained mode UI", etc. are those existing 2d graphics matter. So the approach, afaiu, is a data layout for the scene graph that basically is the more domain general concern of mapping graph e.g. Linked List, datastructures (that are CPU friendly) to array forms (GPU friendly) suitable for parallel treatment. Other GPU concerns, such as minimizing global traffic by local caching, and mapping thread groups to tiles. I found the idea of having the scene graph resident in GPU to be interesting. (note to author: "serialization" comes from networking roots of serializing a data structure for transmision over the net. So, definitely serial. /g)

Agentlien 6y ago

I understand where you are coming from. There is a lot of jargon and it assumes familiarity with many concepts. I think any explanatory images which would help someone unfamiliar with the field would need to be accompanied by quite a bit of explanation. One thing which I think made reading this a bit more work than necessary is that it feels like it's prattling on about a lot of tangential details and never quite gets to the point. edit: a prime example of an unnecessary aside is mentioning the warp/wavefront/subgroup terminology. I feel anyone in the target audience should know this already and it's not really relevant to what's being explained.

skohan 6y ago
It doesn't seem to be a finished work. I guess this is more of a journal entry on the author's initial takeaways from a week-long coding retreat.

MattRix 6y ago

It wouldn’t have been better, it just would have been more high level and generalized, but I don’t think that’s what the author was going for. I found the amount of detail refreshing, and as someone about to make a GPU based 2D display tree renderer, it was written at just the right level to be quite useful.