ShaderX Shader Programming Tips & Tricks With DirectX 9

Introduction
Nicolas Thibieroz shows how to implement deferred shading in “Deferred
Shading with Multiple Render Targets.” Contrary to traditional rendering algorithms,
deferred shading submits the scene geometry only once and stores perpixel
attributes into local video memory to be used in the subsequent rendering
passes. Carsten Wenzel explains how he created the effects in his Meshuggah
demo in “Meshuggah’s Effects Explained.” It is impressive what he has done on
DirectX 8.1-capable hardware and on the Xbox. John Isidoro, Chris Oat, and
Natalya Tatarchuk explain how they created a two-tone, suspended microflake car
paint shader in “Layered Car Paint Shader.” Motion blur effects as shown in the
Animusic demo Pipe Dream are described in “Motion Blur Using Geometry and
Shading Distortion” by Natalya Tatarchuk, Chris Brennan, Alex Vlachos, and John
Isidoro. “Simulation of Iridescence and Translucency on Thin Surfaces” by
Natalya Tatarchuk and Chris Brennan focuses on simulating the visual effect of
translucency and iridescence of thin surfaces such as butterfly wings.
Arkadiusz Waliszewski describes in “Floating-point Cube Maps” how to use
floating-point cube maps to get a much more visually pleasing cube mapping
effect. Thomas Rued compares three different kinds of stereoscopic rendering and
provides shader implementations for each of them in his article “Stereoscopic
Rendering in Hardware Using Shaders.” The article “Hatching, Stroke Styles, and
Pointillism” by Kevin Buchin and Maike Walther shows how to implement hatching
by combining strokes into a texture. These compositions of strokes can convey
the surface form through stroke orientation, the surface material through
stroke arrangement and style, and the effect of light on the surface through stroke
density. Guillaume Werle explains a technique that achieves a realistic-looking
layered fog in “Layered Fog.” It computes the height on a per-vertex basis and
uses the texture coordinate interpolator to get per-pixel precision. Ádám
Moravánszky’s article, “Dense Matrix Algebra on the GPU,” shows how to use
shaders to solve two common problems in scientific computing: solving systems
of linear equations and linear complementarity problems. Both of these problems
come up in dynamics simulation, which is a field drawing increasing interest from
the game developer community.
Section III — Software Shaders and Shader Programming Tips
Dean Macri’s article, “Software Vertex Shader Processing,” explores optimization
guidelines for writing shaders that will use the software vertex processing pipeline.
Additionally, the techniques described in this article should also apply to vertex
shaders written for graphics hardware. Emulating pixel shaders efficiently on
the CPU might be the first step in writing a software 3D engine with shader support
that runs only on the CPU. In “x86 Shaders-ps_2_0 Shaders in Software,”
Nicolas Capens shows how to create a fast-performing software emulation of
ps_2_0 shaders by using a run-time assembler. Oliver Weichhold has created a
software implementation of the Direct3D pipeline. His article, “SoftD3D: A Software-only
Implementation of Microsoft’s Direct3D API,” describes how he did it.
Jeffrey Kiel shows a very handy trick for using named constants in shader development
in “Named Constants in Shader Development.”
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