GPU Ray Tracing - nVidia tech talk

GPU ray tracing is available as a main stream tool. Five years ago considered "the future" but impossible on GPU (challenge/claim made to GPU community). NVidia solution is Optix, a library API for abstracting the RT core from the hardware. There are a bunch of commercial apps for RT on GPU but Optix as an API for developers looks interesting. Beta of new version available soon.

Lunch with the Aussies

Heard from Kevin Smith and Matt Adcock from my ANU/Australia days. They are also in town for SIGGRAPH and we went to lunch. Talked about old times, caught up with what the Canberra (ANU/CSIRO) gang is up to. Also talked a lot about my PhD research, turns out Matt and one of his colleagues (Viveka Welley) are interested in similar areas. Not too surprising since I worked so closely with them in the "ol' days".

Cory Doctorow on DRM

Great talk from Cory Doctorow on the evils of DRM. I suspect it will be up on YouTube soon. Cory explicitly gave open license to record his talk, despite the fact that SIGGRAPH has recording restrictions. An interesting community for such a talk.

SIGGRAPH papers fast forward

Fast forward summarizes all the SIGGRAPH papers with each presenter given one minute to describe their work. I think the speakers spent as much time on their fast forward talks as their paper. Pretty entertaining and lots of great looking talks.

Hot3D panel at HPG 2011

Interesting panel at the end of HPG 2011. David Luebke (nVidia), Mike Houston and Mike Mantor (AMD), and William Mark (Intel) talked about futures of graphics hardware. Interesting that all speakers talked about the impact of other forces that are driving GPU development (mobile computing/power/sales volumes, getting the GPU closer to the CPU). This, combined with other comments during the conference (did you know that the PS3 gpu is five years old and isn't going to be updated for another couple of years) and the influence of HPC on GPUs makes you wonder if high performance graphics will be the driver of GPU development in the future.

High Performance Graphics (HPG) 2011

Back in conference mode so better update the blog. Spent the last couple days at HPG 2011, a conference that is running in parallel to SIGGRAPH 2011. Brings back memories of early to mid nineties when I was working in this area. Back to my teapot days as my brother would say. Pretty interesting to see what is going on. In some ways the same stuff (voxels, bounding volume hierarchies, and frames per second) and in some ways very different (20 ms per frame, and coaxing flops from GPUs). Lots of interesting papers!!!

Bonus was that I got to meet with a couple of old colleagues, including Eric Haines (from my Ray Tracing News days circa 1992) and Mark Bolstad (from IEEE Vis circa 1993).