There are 2 main factors that seem to lead to digital artifacts when creating JPEG images: Aliasing and Compression. Example: Converting a PNG with characters on it to a JPEG or placing vector images over a photograph, will result in pixelization on their edges. The antialiasing generally cr...

From my basic understanding, a Vertex Buffer Object works something like this (psuedo code): Normally, if one wanted to say, draw a square, one could issue line drawing commands. line (0, 0) -> (1, 0) line (1, 0) -> (1, 1) line (1, 1) -> (0, 1) line (0, 1) -> (0, 0) Using a Vertex Buff...

Programmers are supposed to have a fairly good idea of the cost of certain operations: for example the cost of an instruction on CPU, the cost of a L1, L2, or L3 cache miss, the cost of a LHS. When it comes to graphics, I realize I have little to no idea what they are. I have in mind that if we ...

Tiled rendering is used in modern mobile GPU architectures to increase the coherency of memory access by subdividing image space into a regular grid of small (e.g., 32x32 pixel) tiles. Information is scarce on the types of data structures used to track the primitives that are associated with each...

I've read that blur is done in real time graphics by doing it on one axis and then the other. I've done a bit of convolution in 1d in the past but am not super comfortable with it, nor know what to convolve in this case exactly. Can anyone explain in plain terms how a 2d Gaussian Blur of an ima...

I've heard a lot of people working on VR talk about scanline racing and that it's supposed to help improve latency for motion-to-photon. However, it isn't clear to me how this can be done with OpenGL. Could someone explain how scanline racing works, and how it can be implemented on modern GPUs.

For my bachelor thesis I have written my own DirectX11 renderer . It can render water , terrain , dynamic lights and so on. Right now it runs as its own application. My question is what is a good design idea to implement the c++ DirectX code I have written into a actual game. Is building the rend...

In traditional computer graphics, most 3D models are rendered by rasterizing or ray tracing against a subdivided mesh of primitives, usually triangles or quads. More recently, some real-time techniques have been predicated on ray-tracing against signed distance fields (SDFs). Intuitively, these d...

I would like to generate procedural noise on the surface of a sphere (e.g. to procedurally generate planets or marble-textured balls). Of course, I could just take a standard noise algorithm and map it onto the sphere, but this has all the issues of projecting a plane onto a sphere, like distorti...

Image filtering operations such as blurs, SSAO, bloom and so forth are usually done using pixel shaders and "gather" operations, where each pixel shader invocation issues a number of texture fetches to access the neighboring pixel values, and computes a single pixel's worth of the result. This a...

In GLSL, perspective correct interpolation of vertex attributes is the default setting - one can disable it for specific vertex attributes by using the noperspective qualifier. Other than in post-processing shaders, I've never seen the perspective correct interpolation disabled - are there any ot...

How can I distribute points unevenly over an implicit surface, to concentrate points more densely in areas of higher curvature? I've considered adding points randomly and rejecting points not required based on the curvature, but I'd like to know if there is a better approach giving a more even d...

I want to model rays with a continuous range of frequencies so that I can get raytraced images with colour separation on refraction. I can model a light source with a specified frequency distribution by using the distribution to affect the probability of a random ray lying in a given frequency ra...

The OpenGL documentation states that fwidth returns the sum of the absolute value of derivatives in x and y. What does this mean in less mathematical terms, and is there a way to visualize it? Based on my understanding of the function, fwidth(p) has access to the value of p in neighboring pixel...

Using a gaussian distribution of points on an image plane to calculate a pixel value, what radius will give the most information in the final image? Too large a radius gives a blurred image, and too small a radius neglects information that is smaller than a pixel so that it does not contribute to...

I know that depth of field involves blurring. There's some great information about how to do a Gaussian blur in the question How is Gaussian Blur Implemented? But, other than that, how is depth of field implemented? What are the rules about how you blur each pixel, and how do you handle the ca...

Most computer monitors and televisions have a rectangular array of pixels arranged on a square (or nearly square) lattice. Would a hexagonal lattice give better image quality for the same number of pixels? In other words, would the same amount of memory allow storage of more detail? Even if th...

Do different monitors (including mobile screens) still use significantly different gamma functions when displaying colour images? Is there a standardised way to represent colour that can then be translated according to the gamma of the monitor, or are they all sufficiently similar to preclude the...

If rendering an image in 2d, adding depth of field effects (blurring objects further from the focal distance) adds realism and draws the eye to the object of the image. With a 3d image, looking at an object in the image at a given depth will makes objects at all other depths defocused (not blurre...