Specializing shaders

Guenter, Brian; Knoblock, Todd B.; Ruf, Erik

doi:10.1145/218380.218470

Cited by 49 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Guenter, Knoblock & Ruf developed data specialization to reduce the cost of recomputation when only certain shading parameters vary, by automatically segmenting shaders into parameter-dependent and -independent components [8,15].…”

Section: Prior Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Automatic shader specialization has been proposed for simplified shading languages with no control flow [8], but, in the practical context of production, Pellacini et al [23] concluded that, while they "believe that automatic translation might be a superior solution in the future, current approaches are not ready for use." This is the first challenge that our work tackles: we alleviate the need to author multiple versions of a shader by automatically translating unmodified production RenderMan shaders into real-time shaders and precomputation shaders.…”

Section: Chapter 1 Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The lightspeed automatic interactive lighting preview system

Ragan-Kelley¹,

Kilpatrick

Smith

et al. 2007

TOG

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Section: Prior Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Chapter 1 Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The lightspeed automatic interactive lighting preview system

Ragan-Kelley¹,

Kilpatrick

Smith

et al. 2007

TOG

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“…This technique is supported by our algorithm as well as by the Cg system [NVidia 2004]. On the other hand, data specialization [Guenter et al 1995] creates specialized versions of shaders by storing in textures results of expressions dependent on parameters that are not expected to vary; our framework does not yet integrate this technique since the need to allocate texture memory requires all shaders in the scene to be optimized at once, while we concentrate on generating simplifications that can be used in any scene.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

User-configurable automatic shader simplification

Pellacini

2005

ACM Trans. Graph.

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Figure 1: Sequence of increasingly simplified shaders automatically generated by our algorithm. Insets are enlarged 8 times. AbstractProgrammable shading is a fundamental technique for specifying appearance in 3d environments. While shading architectures provides fast execution of shaders, shader evaluation is today a major cost in the rendering process. In the same manner in which geometric simplification lets us deal with large models, it would be beneficial to have an automatic technique that trades off shader quality for speed.This paper presents such a technique by introducing a framework for the automatic simplification of complex procedural shaders, where a sequence of increasingly simplified shaders is generated starting from an original shader together with ranges for all of its input parameters. Our approach works by applying simplification rules to the code of a shader to generate a series of candidates, whose differences from the original one are measured and used to select the candidate with the smallest error. This procedure is repeated until the last shader is a constant. While this automatic procedure generates high quality simplified shaders, the artist might want to emphasize particular aspects of a shader during simplification. Our framework supports this desire by allowing the user to specify additional rules to be considered during simplification. The term user-configurable simplification comes from this feature of our system.We implemented our algorithm to support the simplification of fragment shaders running on graphics hardware. Our results show that automatic simplification of complex procedural shaders is possible with high quality.

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“…The process of generating an instance of a shader modified to cache a specific intermediate calculation is related to compiler specialization methods studied in graphics [Guenter et al 1995;Knoblock and Ruf 1996], which have also found use in lighting design systems [Ragan-Kelley et al 2007]. Unlike this prior work, our focus is on automatic and general methods for identifying optimal shading calculations for reuse.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated reprojection-based pixel shader optimization

Sitthi‐Amorn

Lawrence

Yang³

et al. 2008

ACM Trans. Graph.

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10% 5% 0% Figure 1: Several optimization results produced with our system. Each image compares (top) an input pixel shader to (bottom) a version modified to cache and reuse some partial shading computation over consecutive frames. Our system automatically selects the intermediate values to be reused and the rate at which cached entries are refreshed so as to maximize performance improvement while minimizing (inset) the visual error injected into the final shading. AbstractWe present a framework and supporting algorithms to automate the use of temporal data reprojection as a general tool for optimizing procedural shaders. Although the general strategy of caching and reusing expensive intermediate shading calculations across consecutive frames has previously been shown to provide an effective trade-off between speed and accuracy, the critical choices of what to reuse and at what rate to refresh cached entries have been left to a designer. The fact that these decisions require a deep understanding of a procedure's semantic structure makes it challenging to select optimal candidates among possibly hundreds of alternatives. Our automated approach relies on parametric models of the way possible caching decisions affect the shader's performance and visual fidelity. These models are trained using a sample rendering session and drive an interactive profiler in which the user can explore the error/performance trade-offs associated with incorporating temporal reprojection. We evaluate the proposed models and selection algorithm with a prototype system used to optimize several complex shaders and compare our approach to current alternatives.

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Specializing shaders

Cited by 49 publications

References 10 publications

The lightspeed automatic interactive lighting preview system

The lightspeed automatic interactive lighting preview system

User-configurable automatic shader simplification

Automated reprojection-based pixel shader optimization

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