Embarrassingly Parallel (gpn23)

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Did you always want to know how immensely detailed 3D graphics make it to your screen in real-time (e.g. in video games)? Are you curious about how the underlying hardware is used to enable this? This talk will cover the basics of (realtime) 3D rendering, including some of the underlying math. It will touch on a lot of the tricks used to add more and more visual fidelity to scenes while keeping them still quick to render. Additionally, there will be a brief overview of the specifics of graphics processing units (GPUs) and some of their quirks. At the end of this talk, you will know that everything is triangles and how a rendering pipeline works, along with a few pointers on how to dig deeper into the topic. Many video games and engines can support amazing three-dimensional enviroments and models consisting of millions of triangles shown on screen at the same time, while at the same time managing to process input, handle physics and logic, and render a new frame in (ideally) less than 20 milliseconds. Naturally, this involves a ton of optimizations and little tricks, ranging from more simple things, like only rendering parts of objects the virtual camera can see, up to more complicated things, like reducing the complexity of (more distant) models without affecting their visuals as much. By far the biggest idea that enables rendering these massives scenes at decent framerates is simplifying the problem as much as possible, such that it becomes so easy to distribute over many parallel processing units, or simply "embarrassingly parallel". Combined with modern GPUs, which usually feature thousand of relatively simple parallel processing units, this is essentially what realtime graphics are: break down everything into simple geometric primitives (triangles) and fake the rest as best you can. We will cover the basics of a 3D rendering pipeline, from projecting triangles to the screen, mapping them to pixels (rasterization), and applying additional effects (shading). This will be somewhat technical, but hopefully still digestible, and as a treat, there will be lots of eye candy. Additionally, we will also take a look at how more complicated effects, like shadows, are realized in these pipelines. Finally, we will peak under the hood of GPUs: how they work and what they can handle best. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://cfp.gulas.ch/gpn23/talk/AGPWNN/