Recently the Vulkan API received an exciting new feature, which is video decoding, utilizing the built-in fixed function video unit found in many GPUs. This allows to the writing of super fast cross-platform video applications while freeing up the CPU from expensive decoding tasks.
Read More »
If you spend a long enough time in graphics development, the time will come eventually when you want to cast between different formats of a GPU resource. The problem is that information about how to do this was a bit hard to come by – until now.
Read More »
I recently implemented animation retargeting, something that’s not frequently discussed on the internet in detail. My goal was specifically to copy animations between similar types of skeletons: humanoid to humanoid. A more complicated solution for example, that can retarget humanoid animation to a frog was not my intention.
Read More »
10 years ago, I created my first game and became a game developer. Remembering the journey:
Read More »
This post shows a way to compute derivatives for texture filtering in compute shaders (for visibility buffer shading). I was missing a step-by-step explanation of how to do this, but after some trial and error, the following method turned out to work well.
Read More »
Wicked Engine used Visual Studio to compile all its shaders for a long time, but that changed around a year ago (in 2021) when custom shader compiling tools were implemented. This blog highlights the benefits of this and may provide some new ideas if you are developing graphics programs or tools.
Read More »
Lately I’ve been interested in modernizing the geometry pipeline in the rendering engine, for example reducing the vertex shaders. It’s a well known fact that geometry shaders are not making efficient use of the GPU hardware, but similar issues could apply for vertex and tessellation shaders too, just because there is a need for pushing data through multiple pipeline stages. This can result in memory traffic and allocation bottlenecks between geometry and pixel stages.
Read More »
Wicked Engine can handle today’s advanced rendering effects, with multiple graphics APIs (DX11, DX12 and Vulkan at the time of writing this). The key to enable this is to use a good graphics abstraction, so these complicated algorithms only need to be written once.
Read More »
The Vulkan and DX12 graphics devices now support bindless descriptors in Wicked Engine. Earlier and in DX11, it was only possible to access textures, buffers (resource descriptors) and samplers in the shaders by binding them to specific slots. First, the binding model limitations will be described briefly, then the bindless model will be discussed.
Read More »
Variable Rate Shading (VRS) is a new DX12 feature introduced recently, that can be used to control shading rate. To be more precise, it is used to reduce shading rate, as opposed to the Multi Sampling Anti Aliasing (MSAA) technique which is used to increase it.
Read More »
Wicked Engine Net 