080806 / Random Stuff

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After many requests, the blog now has an experimental atom feed. Decided to trade getting any sleep tonight, for this functionality on the blog. Not sure if it is 100% to spec, but looks to work from google and firefox live bookmarks.

DX11

More info on DX11 has been made public at the 2008 XNA Gamefest and at some point in the future, the slides and presentations should arrive here. DX11 provides a compute shader which looks very much like CUDA, but has cross vendor support. Invocation is via a regular (1D, 2D, or 3D) array of threads. This thread array is further broken down into a sub grouping where the threads of the sub group can access a new shared register class. Compute shader also has access to a thread id, well as atomic operations on global memory or shared registers, and general purpose unordered read/write of global memory. Initial prototypes show 2x improvement over DX10 code, while much better performance should be possible in theory. Also HLSL 5.0 provides dynamic linkage, as well as unordered reads and writes of global memory for sure in compute and pixel shaders. Very exciting indeed.

OpenGL 3.0

According to GPU Cafe Rumors GL3 is indeed here and we will have actual NVidia drivers in September. Perhaps ATI, Intel, and Apple will soon also have real GL3 support. Will have to wait for Siggraph to know for sure.

Larrabee

The Siggraph Larrabee paper is out and confirms the expected software rendering architecture for Larrabee. General vector scatter/gather to/from L1 is there as well, and texturing goes through L2. Still lots of unanswered questions, check out the speculation on Beyond3D.

Busy

Been too busy at the art shows to get any good programming work done at home ... here is our booth right before our last show opened.

Also just celebrated our 6th anniversary!

Next Time

Been porting my forth like scripting language (which I use to build this website among other things) to C for intended use to accelerate general development. Enables insane factoring of code in any language, as well as syntax, etc. More later...