Community Papermint Designs

Shadertoy is a web based platform for developing, sharing, learning, getting inspiration and teaching GLSL based shading. Developers create shaders using a live environment that allows them to see the final results as they are coding. These creations can react to different inputs such us music, videos, time of the day, and others. Shadertoy.com also introduces a social platform, which makes it a place to give feedback, promote great work, and share creations regardless of being an industry professional or students/hobbyists. The website has been running for a couple of months and has grown rapidly with beautiful works showing a great variety of rendering techniques, from post processing effects, procedural raymarchers, raytracers and demoscene pieces to simple 2D procedural graphics.

GLSL Hacker is a cross-platform utility (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X) for coding 3D demos and prototypes with GLSL, Lua and Python programming languages. GLSL Hacker 0.5.0 adds the support of Python 2.7, improves compute shaders support and fixes many bugs.

The NVIDIA Developer Tools team is proud to announce the final release of NVIDIA® Nsight Development Platform, Visual Studio Edition 3.0, an application development platform for heterogeneous systems. This new release officially supports OpenGL frame debugging and profiling, GLSL GPU shader debugging, local single GPU shader debugging, the new Kepler GK110 architecture found in Tesla K20 & GeForce GTX TITAN, and CUDA 5.0. This release requires NVIDIA Display Driver Release 319 or newer.

The SilverLining Sky, 3D Cloud, and Weather SDK for OpenGL now lets you switch between the new Hosek-Wilkie model presented at the 2012 SIGGRAPH conference, and the 1999 Preetham model for simulating real-time skies for any time and location. A video’s been prepared using SilverLining comparing its extensions to the two models.

After GpuTest said it could do tessellation shaders under mac OSX i decided to investigate how to do this as it’s an undocumented feature. This blog post shows how to define the tessellation control and evaluation shaders under mac osx and also how to enable the drawing of GL_PATCHES.

GpuTest is a new OpenGL graphics benchmark tool for Windows, Linux and OS X that includes several 3D tests: one test based on FurMark, one OpenGL 4 tessellation test, one OpenGL 3.3 geometry instancing test and two heavy pixel shader tests. Each test can be launched from the command line (an user interface is available for Windows and OS X) and benchmark results can be saved in a CSV file.

There are three basic OpenGL examples available about shadow volumes, displacement mapping with screen space dependent tessellation and an erode effect using a 3D noise texture. The OpenGL Graphics Engine is extended as well and there are now four complex OpenGL examples available. All examples do have source code and assets included.

Jellypie Software have released 3D Box Shot Pro V2.01 with a software rendering option that allows the program to run on any Windows PC, irrespective of the graphics card or driver installed. The software version includes an LLVMPipe software driver that emulates OpenGL 2.1 functionality to provide environment and depth mapping effects on machines without hardware OpenGL 2.1 support. The software driver does incur a performance hit, with the real time preview in 3D Box Shot Pro running at a lower frame rate. The preview output also lacks anti aliasing, however the rendered output, while taking significantly longer to generate, looks as good always

Comportability launches as a formal organization for OpenCL users. Established as a non-profit corporation by some of OpenCL’s primary advocates, Comportability is an open forum for all things related to OpenCL. Membership is free and individuals are invited to participate in discussions, upload software and take part in the annual workshop. Institutions and vendors may join as voting members, and are invited to form regional chapters, which are encouraged to host future meetings and workshops. The 1st International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL) will take place May 13-14, 2013 at the Technology Square Research Building (TSRB) at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Registration for this event is open and the program is on-line. 

Intel’s Eric Anholt has made some improvements to their official classic driver. Eric’s first i915 driver change was always enabling OpenGL 2.0 support rather than OpenGL 1.4 as the case has been. Immediately following that was another commit to add support for GL_EXT_texture_sRGB and GL_EXT_texture_sRGB_decode. Phoronix has more about the changes on their site.

G-Truc has updated their OpenGL driver status for April 2013. The tested drivers this month are AMD Catalyst 13.4, Intel 9.18.10.3006 and NVIDIA Forceware 320.00 beta.

Stripped down to its bare PCB, the Radeon HD 7990 consists of two Tahiti GPUs, each surrounded by 3 GB of GDDR5 memory and connected by a PLX Technology PEX 8747 switch. Tom’s Hardware does a great review as always with OpenGL and OpenCL benchmarks and comparisons.

The Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) provides a simple API to OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenCL and Game Controllers enabling the production of state of the art games for Windows, Linux and Mac. Version 2.9.0 contains a complete rewrite of the mac backend, new OpenGL/OpenCL extension and bug fixes.

OGLplus is a portable open-source library implementing an object-oriented facade over the OpenGL (version 4) C-language API. It provides wrappers which automate resource management and make the use of OpenGL in C++ safer and more convenient. OGLplus comes with more than 100 examples of usage and several tutorials.

Learn by doing with a series of game prototypes to demonstrate the fundamentals of OpenGL-based space combat and realtime strategy game programming. Just released, prototype 4 is focusing on procedural planet, moon and asteroid rendering: A fully playable simple realtime strategy space game based on prototype 3; Procedural surface generation in realtime for solid planets, moons and gas giants; Screen space atmospheric light scattering (both Rayleigh and Mie); Planetary ring and cloud layer rendering (combined with light scattering); Visualisation of solar and planetary ring asteroid belts.

These three blogas are the final in a series that present you the improvments that are comming to OpenGL support in Qt 5.1. In third article, we take a look at timer query objects which are part of desktop OpenGL. The fourth part focuses on OpenGL debug output, which is based on GL_KHR_debug extension. The fifth blog brings a short look into the future beyond Qt 5.1, and a terrain tessellation example with video.

Sundog’s Triton Ocean SDK 2.1 now features OpenCL-accelerated waves using the most accurate wave spectral models available. This release adds the fastest, most realistic 3D ocean effects on the market to games and simulations. In addition to local wind waves, Triton 2.1 simulates the effect of swells from distant storms, all at over 100 frames per second. Rotor wash, ship wakes, impacts, spray, and foam effects are also included.

GLFW is a library for portable OpenGL application development. It manages a window, OpenGL context, resolution switching, keyboard, mouse, joystick and time input, and more. Version 2.7.8 adds fixes for a few minor bugs on each platform, most notably the flashing window on Windows.

The new update of the Intel HD Graphics driver provides tighter OpenCL-OpenGL integration with the implementation with new support for depth images and sharing of multi-sampled textures. These new implemented Khronos extensions extend interoperability with OpenGL and enable an OpenCL* image to be created from an OpenGL multi-sampled (known as MSAA) texture (color or depth). Intel released the new Intel SDK for OpenCL Applications 2013 that enable developers to take advantage of these new capabilities. The SDK is available as a FREE download.

Chris Forbes’ newly-published patches on Sunday morning are for ARB_texture_gather, a feature mandated by OpenGL 4.0 and previously not tackled within the Mesa/Gallium3D world.