Independent Study: Week 2

Red Dot:

Still a little quirky, lots of hard-coded stuff (namely the geometry in the world), but it's working!

Annnnnnd I'm probably going to have to start over with CUDA because of that performance thing I was complaining about. But it's not a sure thing yet.

Independent Study: Week 1

Quick update. I've got OpenCL interfacing with OpenGL and drawing a real nice gradient:

I'd be happier if the framerate was higher however. 800 FPS might sound great, but I know that's going to plummet when I actually start doing stuff in the OpenCL kernel code. Right now it's doing some floating point arithmetic and that's it. Also a similar procedural gradient as a shader in OpenGL would probably be hitting 3000 FPS on my test system so I'm not sure what's up there either. Definitely going to have to work on it.

Independent Study

So I'm running out of courses that I'm required to take at RIT for my software engineering degree, and faster than I'm running out of required course blocks that I have to fill in order to actually graduate. So I'm doing an independent study. I've decided that writing a ton isn't for me, so I'm keeping these brief from now on until some miraculous day comes around where people want to actually read what I'm typing. This was after all just for my own records...

So yeah, independent study. I'm doing Photon Mapping on the GPU with a focus on real-time results. My laptop's a beast for it's age (Quadcore i7, GeForce 285M GTX video card) so I should be able to get some power out of it. I'm going to use OpenCL I think, but I might change my mind in the next few days and move to CUDA instead. Other than that there's not much to say right now. I'll throw up another post with content next hopefully.

Writing a 2D Library On Top of OpenGL 3.x Practices

Having straightened out MyGL this weekend to behave far more transparently with the underlying OpenGL state machine (effectively created an object-oriented OpenGL 3.x filter) I now have to take on the challenge of actually writing easy-to-use code bases on top of it. The first issue that I'm going to tackle is two-dimensional rendering. I don't think OpenGL gives 2D enough love by default. You look at an API like DirectX and they've got a custom sprite rendering component that provides accelerated blitting operations right along side traditional 3D rendering techniques. Although it's closed-source I have to imagine that under hood this sprite rendering system is uses much the same hardware techniques as the rest of the API. There's no reason this can't be done with OpenGL, except that OpenGL chooses not to anything like it. My own opinion is that OpenGL is trying to be as low-level and "simple" as it can be, and as a result the idea of an additional layer of indirection from the hardware that a sprite-rendering system would provide doesn't quite feel right.