RESOURCES

There are a wealth of resources available though it's sometimes a bit tough to find them. I've attempted to collect some of the most useful ones and include them in this section.

DirectX and Shader Programming

Of course, the best site is the Microsoft Web site. The Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Web site is the place to start. It'll have all the latest code, the retail and debug SDK release, as well as some articles designed to help you learn DirectX and Shader programming. Go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/DirectX.

The NVIDIA developer site contains lots of code samples and documentation. Go to http://developer.nvidia.com.

The ATI site isn't quite as full as the NVIDIA site, but they have some high-quality stuff there as well. Go to the Developer section at http://www.ati.com.

At this time, 3Dlabs has been acquired by Creative Labs. This likely means that Creative will be selling the 3Dlabs consumer market cards while 3Dlabs sells to the workstation market. You can probably find out lots of interesting things at http://www.3dlabs.com/support/developer.

Matrox is the only other graphics card vender that supports shaders, but they are a bit lacking in the developer support area. They are on the Web at http://www.matrox.com.

Wolfgang Engel has a book Direct3D ShaderX and a Web site that's devoted to the book, http://www.shaderx.com.

The Game Programming Gems series from Charles River Media has some sections on shader programming at http://www.charlesriver.com.

And, of course, my own site is devoted to keeping up with shaders and shader technology: http://www.directx.com.

Graphics Programming in General

Every year you can attend Siggraph (http://www.siggraph.org) or GDC, the Game Developer's Conference (http://www.gdconf.com). Siggraph is a bit more polished (and cheaper), and it's starting to get lecturers from the games community. The GDC is the place to go if you're a game programmer—you can live, eat, and breathe games for five days. You'll see more innovative stuff at Siggraph, but you'll get more practical information at the GDC. Stuff typically shows up at Siggraph, then someone programs it into a game and talks about it at the next GDC. If you've never been to one, you should really go—you'll be changed forever. Both conferences typically have hardware vendor-sponsored sessions. If you're an ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) member (http://www.acm.org), you can get a discount to Siggraph.

The proceedings of each Siggraph are published, and the course notes are available on CD as well. If you can't make it to Siggraph, it's well worth the investment to get a copy of the proceedings and the course notes. The ACM also has published a collection of papers titled Seminal Graphics [WOLFE 1998], which contains reprints of papers that have long been out of print, like Phong's original paper.

Microsoft also hosts a yearly event called Meltdown (typically in July or August) where you can get the inside technical stuff from the DirectX guys themselves. It's a very heavy-duty graphics and multimedia get together. A lot of hardware manufacturers will bring their latest boards so that you can test your code on it. Search http://www.microsoft.com for more information.

I should also mention that NVIDIA and ATI have also taken to holding their own one- to two-day intensive sessions ("The Gathering" and "Mojo Day," respectively) on programming their hardware. The benefit is they are reasonably cheap, and you get a videocard to boot.

Game Developer Magazine (http://www.gdmag.com) is a monthly magazine that frequently has articles on graphics programming, and if you fill out a questionnaire, you can get a free subscription.

The Journal of Graphics Tools (http://www.acm.org/jgt/) is a "quarterly journal whose primary mission is to provide the computer graphics research, development, and production community with practical ideas and techniques that solve real problems." It's a bit more theoretical than Game Developer, but they do have some articles that are useful to the everyday graphics programmer. If you are an ACM member (http://www.acm.org), you can get it at a discount. The first quarter issue of 2003 is on hardware accelerated rendering techniques.

The IEEE's Computer Graphics and Applications (http://www.computer.org/cga/) is another monthly magazine that's chock full of information. You'll get practical as well as academic articles, but it's also got "Jim Blinn's Corner," which is worth reading all by itself.

I've mentioned the Game Programming Gems series from Charles River Media already. That series was inspired by the Graphics Gems series of books from Academic Press (http://www.academicpress.com). There's an online repository for the source code from the books as well as links for the books at http://www.graphicsgems.org.

One of my favorite graphics books is Real-Time Rendering [RTR 2002] (get the 2nd edition) by Tomas Akenine-Môller and Eric Haines, published by AK Peters. They also have a Web site devoted to their book (http://www.realtimerendering.com), which they update frequently. If you only get one graphics book, get this one.



Real-Time Shader Programming(c) Covering Directx 9. 0
Real-Time Shader Programming (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)
ISBN: 1558608532
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 104
Authors: Ron Fosner

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