Jess Birch @shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place
Researcher (program analysis); technical artist turned coder; reader of the Local timeline; very tall (queer) woman.
Paid to do a great many different things.
A brief history of the evolution of grammars, parsers and compilerse from 400 BCE onwards.
Running @aras's current C++ ToyPathTracer on my tablet (6650U/Iris540 = 23/80 Mr/s) & desktop (2500K/1070 = 30/465 Mr/s) is going on the list of why I should grab a new Ryzen later in the week.
Sanity check: the 1070 score almost perfectly predicts boost GFLOPS vs http://aras-p.info/blog/2018/04/16/Daily-Pathtracer-10-Update-CsharpGPU/; my Iris seems to be slightly ahead (maybe as it was before thermal throttle kicked in).
So this is interesting (& expect more once full reviews are out next week) - Ryzen CPUs running games with two different 3200MHz RAM kits with enough gap to be meaningful (presumed to be due to mobo tweaks/bugs impacting latency). https://www.gamersnexus.net/news-pc/3283-ryzen-2-pre-test-x470-vs-x370-scaling-memory-r7-2700x
I think it's brave of AMD PR/OEM partners to tell semi-informed consumers that they've got all-old Radeon 500Xs (the new 'X' meaning nothing has changed except the name) a week before they release new Ryzen 2000s that are actually revised parts with faster clocks & some architecture tweaks. 🤦
It's nice how much knowledge is embodied into Rust's type system, with traits, associated types, PhantomData for wrappers, etc. A lot of it just happens during compilation time and no artifacts remain in the object code - it's all compile-time enforced consistency; no runtime overhead.
Really good and easy to follow introduction to color theory: http://jamie-wong.com/post/color/
A true Masterpiece release at the revision this year in the 4K byte category #revision2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncdA3t_vzF8
The default binary sizes for Rust programs is a bit of a shock from C (but also you can't just rely on the platform having the std lib installed) so here's a good checklist when size matters (some tools you may need to find Windows equivalents): https://jamesmunns.com/update/2018/04/01/tinyrocket.html
I'll write a series of "n00b tries to pathtracer" blog posts. Mostly for laughs, and also to have something embarrassing in the future :) http://aras-p.info/blog/2018/03/28/Daily-Pathtracer-Part-0-Intro/
Something I've not seen noted in the discussion of HDR's value as a standard pushing high-nits output: that's only a peak output for white lights. The brightest R/G/B primary light you can display is about a third of that. If you want a 500 nits red traffic light, you need a screen that can push 1500 nits.
So with the hybrid real-time ray tracing stuff, my attention is being drawn towards how it needs us to better manage level-of-detail stuff (interacting with distant rays, based on ray density we presumably calculate on top of our denoise + temporal blend system?) - idly thinking on the Twitter convos that Aras's blog post linked to.
Best DXR/RTX thing I've read so far (kinda eager to play with & see costs vs existing RT SS GI/AO [hacks] on typical hardware): https://www.ea.com/seed/news/seed-gdc-2018-presentation-slides-shiny-pixels
TIL: If you have a window that can have either an OpenGL or a Vulkan context bound, and _every trace_ of that window is not completely expunged from OpenGL, creating a Vulkan swapchain for that window will fail with an utterly mysterious and undocumented VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED
Some quick incoherent (ha!) thoughts on DX Raytracing. http://aras-p.info/blog/2018/03/21/Random-Thoughts-on-Raytracing/
Wow, those numbers make the first question, "is there a bug in the ATi detection code?" (but presumably not). Optimise primarily for nVidia+Intel if you're shipping for Rift then. https://developer.oculus.com/hardware-report/pc/
The making of Immersion, a 64k intro by ctrl-alt-test: http://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/?p=463 #demoscene
Most people are travelling to GDC this weekend but I'll be enjoying it from afar. Today, I'm wondering if the asset fidelity arms race is actually part of sustainable growth & if it'll be mainly slowing down anyway soon? http://blog.shivoa.net/2018/03/the-asset-fidelity-arms-race.html
Today has mainly involved reading details of current T(SS)AA solutions (with a side of HDR-done-right). Thanks to everyone who has written up/presented their engine's methods.
I realise it's not the first (free) documentary on the Steam video service but it's interesting to see more projects adding that to their distribution list (vs relying on YouTube/Google bandwidth). Wonder if Twitch/Amazon/(Prime?) have ambitions in this area. http://store.steampowered.com/app/804410/
The float_cmp crate can now handle librsvg's needs: https://github.com/mikedilger/float-cmp/issues/13
This is awesome. We no longer have "==" comparisons of floating-point numbers, which were almost always wrong.