How to render a bunny in modern style: I

Rise of Graphic Hardwares

Why not count on CPU?

Reminder: classic pipeline

• Geometric primitives
• Modelling and transformation
• Camera transformation
• Projection transformation
• Clipping
• Scan conversion or rasterization
• Texturing, fragment shading

True reason: cheaper video games

• Mainly focus on Sprite rendering (70s to 90s)

Basketball, 1974

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMV_meVa7m8

• Atari 2600, 1977, the first Game console

  • (ROM) Support Microprocessor-based hardware and ROM cartridges containing game code
  • (VIA) Since background rendering needs much more expensive RAM, control scan line directly for reducing RAM usage
  • Designer Jay Miner is also 'Father of the Amiga'

• Namco Galaxian, 1979, with RGB color, multi-colored sprites and tilemap backgrounds

  • Display resolution: 256x224 to 384x264(horizontal), 224x256 to 264x384 (vertical)
  • Refresh rate: 60.60606 Hz (V-sync)
  • Color model: RGB
  • Color palette: 224
  • Colors on screen: 32
  • Background planes: Tilemap plane, Bitmap plane
  • Sprite capabilities: Line buffer 8x8 to 16x16 sizes, 4 colors per sprite, 15 sprites (7 main sprites, 7 shells, 1 missile) per scanline, 240 sprite pixels per scanline, sprite flipping, sprite animation

• Namco System 21, 1988

  • ​The first hardware based 3D polygon system

  • Winning Run, 1988

 Age of PC

• Commodore Amiga, 1985

  • Developed by Jay Miner

  • The first PC with built-in but independent Graphic system.

    • line draw

    • area fill

    • a stream processor called a blitter which accelerated the movement, manipulation and combination of multiple arbitrary bitmaps.

    • Also included was a coprocessor with its own (primitive) instruction set capable of directly invoking a sequence of graphics operations without CPU intervention. 

• IBM 8514, 1987

  • The first video card for IBM compatible machine

  • 1024x768 pixels with 256 colors at 43.5 Hz, or 640x480 at 60 Hz

  • Provide common 2D-drawing operations (line-draw, color-fill, BITBLT)

• Age of Windows: before late 90s

  • GUI ask for more 2D acceleration (Like BITBLT)

  • Microsoft's WinG to DirectDraw

  • More focus on CPU-assisted real-time 3D graphics until mid 90s

  • Advanced T&L (transform, clipping, and lighting) hardwares first appeared in arcade system boards at same time

• Age of Windows: before late 90s

  • For advanced 3D requirement, PowerVR and 3dfx Voodoo are only with discrete boards dedicated to accelerating 3D functions, mainly for OEM, 1995-2000

  • ATI, Nvidia, and Rendition involved in the war with single chip card.

  • GeForce 256 released in 1999, the world's first GPU, Graphics Processing Unit

    • a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that are capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second

 Age of API

• OpenGL: founded by SGI, 1992

  • 3D Graphic rendering comes from algorithm

  • Algorithm is written as code at first time

  • OpenGL decides to evolve using software implementation

  • Providers follow to support new features in their own hardware from API

  • Latest version 4.5, August, 2014 

  • Mac OS X will migrate from OpenGL to Metal

• Direct3D: originally bought by Microsoft for win95, 1995

  • Incomplete as OpenGL before D3D 7.

  • Most widely used for game development, including DirectX family

  • Latest version 12, July 29, 2015

  • Now more prior to OpenGL

 Age of Computing

• GPGPU, General Purpose Computing on GPU

  • First introduced with GeForce 8 series, 2006

  • The earliest widely adopted programming model for GPU computing was Nvidia's CUDA platform

  • OpenCL is an open standard defined by the Khronos Group

  • OpenCL is the most popular GPGPU development platform now