Siggraph is over

Siggraph has come to a close, and I've walked away a little more informed than I was last week.

If there was an OpenGL BOF, I missed it. I was busy with the talks, and missed a number of things I'd liked to have seen. 

I enjoyed the Photon Mapping talk today; While I've been aware of it, and the basic ideas, I'd never looked at it in depth.  I like what I saw, and I'll have to pick up Henrik Jensen's book.  Matt Pharr's book also looks quite good, and I'll probably order both from Amazon when I get home. 

The talk on crowd simulation and perception was also interesting, and I'll have to have a look through the paper.

I picked up "Practical Multi-Projector Display Design", "Tensor Voting" and "Real-Time Collision Detection", each of which should keep me busy for a few weeks. Practical Multi-Projector Display Design should be helpful over the next few weeks as I setup our cave-like environment.

I'm looking forward to getting home, and I hope everyone had a good Siggraph. 

OpenCL, DirectX Compute Shader, CUDA, CAL, Larrabee, OpenGL 3.0, and a neat demo by Jon Olick

A few of the presentations this week have covered Larrabee, both in terms of architecture and conceptually.  A talk today mentioned that Larrabee could submit draw calls to itself, which I hadn't considered before.  Even if it fails to live up as a rasterizer, there will still be plenty of market for it as a compute-enabling device.

A high level overview and sample code of both OpenCL and DirectX Compute Shaders were presented, and I'm fairly excited.  They're quite different approaches, with different goals, and I whole heartedly hope they both work out.

I've used CUDA a bit in the past, but I didn't know until today that AMD had updated their offering from CTM to a new higher-level api called CAL.  I'll have to check it out next time I have an ATi board to play with.

I've already said I was disappointed with what was missing in OpenGL 3.0. What I didn't say is that I'm excited about working with the new extensions and seeing what I can do.

OpenGL 3.0, PhysX

OpenGL 3.0 is a bit of a disappointment. The API promised never materialized. It would have been better recieved by the community if the ARB/Khronos had been up front about issues as they arose. Instead, they decided to keep things quiet, and many developers are quite upset. I'm going to spend a couple of months evaluating it, but I am disappointed and I've started http://osxna.blogspot.com to cover my XNA and D3D projects. (I'm going to keep this blog alive too.)

I went to the PhysX presentation at Siggraph, and asked the presenter about OS X support. His reply was something along the lines of "This question has come up before. I can't say anything official, but we're looking at it." From the way he said it, I took it as a "Yes, but I can't say yes because we haven't officially announced it." CUDA is available on OS X, and PhysX is built on CUDA, so the framework is there. We'll see what happens.