Shader metaprogramming

ABSTRACT

Modern graphics accelerators have embedded programmable components in the form of vertex and fragment shading units. Current APIs permit specification of the programs for these components using an assembly-language level interface. Compilers for high-level shading languages are available but these read in an external string specification, which can be inconvenient.It is possible, using standard C++, to define a high-level shading language directly in the API. Such a language can be nearly indistinguishable from a special-purpose shading language, yet permits more direct interaction with the specification of textures and parameters, simplifies implementation, and enables on-the-fly generation, manipulation, and specialization of shader programs. A shading language built into the API also permits the lifting of C++ host language type, modularity, and scoping constructs into the shading language without any additional implementation effort.

REFERENCES

• 1: 3DLabs. OpenGL 2.0 Shading Language White Paper, 1.1 edition, December 2001.
• 2: John Amanatides, Algorithms for the detection and elimination of specular aliasing, Proceedings of the conference on Graphics interface '92, p.86-93, September 1992, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 3: Anthony A. Apodaca , Larry Gritz , Brian A. Barsky, Advanced RenderMan: Creating CGI for Motion Picture, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1999
• 4: ATI. Pixel Shader Extension, 2000. Specification document, available from http://www.ati.com/online/sdk.
• 5: Scott Draves, Compiler Generation for Interactive Graphics Using Intermediate Code, Selected Papers from the Internaltional Seminar on Partial Evaluation, p.95-114, February 12-16, 1996
• 6: David S. Ebert , F. Kenton Musgrave , Darwyn Peachey , Ken Perlin , Steven Worley, Texturing and modeling: a procedural approach, Academic Press Professional, Inc., San Diego, CA, 1994
• 7: Conal Elliott , Sigbjorn Finne , Oege de Moor, Compiling Embedded Languages, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Semantics, Applications, and Implementation of Program Generation, p.9-27, September 20, 2000
• 8: Dawson R. Engler, VCODE: a retargetable, extensible, very fast dynamic code generation system, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1996 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.160-170, May 21-24, 1996, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
• 9: Brian Guenter , Todd B. Knoblock , Erik Ruf, Specializing shaders, Proceedings of the 22nd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.343-350, September 1995 [doi>10.1145/218380.218470]
• 10: Pat Hanrahan , Jim Lawson, A language for shading and lighting calculations, Proceedings of the 17th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.289-298, September 1990, Dallas, TX, USA
• 11: John C. Hart , Nate Carr , Masaki Kameya , Stephen A. Tibbitts , Terrance J. Coleman, Antialiased parameterized solid texturing simplified for consumer-level hardware implementation, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware, p.45-53, August 08-09, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/311534.311575]
• 12: Wolfgang Heidrich , Hans-Peter Seidel, View-independent environment maps, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware, p.39-ff., August 31-September 01, 1998, Lisbon, Portugal [doi>10.1145/285305.285310]
• 13: Wolfgang Heidrich , Hans-Peter Seidel, Realistic, hardware-accelerated shading and lighting, Proceedings of the 26th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.171-178, July 1999 [doi>10.1145/311535.311554]
• 14: Jan Kautz and Michael D. McCool. Approximation of glossy reflection with prefiltered environment maps. In Proc. Graphics Interface, pages 119-126, May 2000.
• 15: Jan Kautz , Pere-Pau Vázquez , Wolfgang Heidrich , Hans-Peter Seidel, Unified Approach to Prefiltered Environment Maps, Proceedings of the Eurographics Workshop on Rendering Techniques 2000, p.185-196, June 26-28, 2000
• 16: B. W. Kernighan. Pic --- a language for typesetting graphics. Software --- Pract. and Exper. (GB), 12:1-21, January 1982.
• 17: E. Lafortune and Y. Willems. Using the modified Phong reflectance model for physically based rendering. Technical Report CW197, Dept. Comp. Sci., K. U. Leuven, 1994.
• 18: Anselmo Lastra , Steven Molnar , Marc Olano , Yulan Wang, Real-time programmable shading, Proceedings of the 1995 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics, p.59-ff., April 09-12, 1995, Monterey, California, United States [doi>10.1145/199404.199414]
• 19: Peter Lee , Mark Leone, Optimizing ML with run-time code generation, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1996 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.137-148, May 21-24, 1996, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
• 20: Jon Leech. OpenGL extensions and restrictions for PixelFlow. Technical Report TR98-019, Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina, 1998.
• 21: Erik Lindholm , Mark J. Kligard , Henry Moreton, A user-programmable vertex engine, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.149-158, August 2001 [doi>10.1145/383259.383274]
• 22: William R. Mark , Kekoa Proudfoot, Compiling to a VLIW fragment pipeline, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware, p.47-56, August 2001, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/383507.383526]
• 23: Michael D. McCool , Jason Ang , Anis Ahmad, Homomorphic factorization of BRDFs for high-performance rendering, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.171-178, August 2001 [doi>10.1145/383259.383276]
• 24: Michael D. McCool. SMASH: A Next-Generation API for Programmable Graphics Accelerators. Technical Report CS-2000-14, University of Waterloo, April 2001. API Version 0.2. Presented at SIGGRAPH 2001 Course #25, Real-Time Shading.
• 25: Microsoft. DX9, 2001. Microsoft Meltdown 2001 presentation, available from http://www.microsoft.com/-mscorp/corpevents/meltdown2001/ppt/DXG9.ppt.
• 26: Marc Olano , Anselmo Lastra, A shading language on graphics hardware: the pixelflow shading system, Proceedings of the 25th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.159-168, July 1998 [doi>10.1145/280814.280857]
• 27: Marc Olano , Anselmo Lastra, A programmable pipeline for graphics hardware, 1998
• 28: Mark S. Peercy , Marc Olano , John Airey , P. Jeffrey Ungar, Interactive multi-pass programmable shading, Proceedings of the 27th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.425-432, July 2000 [doi>10.1145/344779.344976]
• 29: Ken Perlin, An image synthesizer, Proceedings of the 12th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.287-296, July 1985
• 30: Massimiliano Poletto , Wilson C. Hsieh , Dawson R. Engler , M. Frans Kaashoek, C and tcc: a language and compiler for dynamic code generation, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.21 n.2, p.324-369, March 1999 [doi>10.1145/316686.316697]
• 31: Kekoa Proudfoot , William R. Mark , Svetoslav Tzvetkov , Pat Hanrahan, A real-time procedural shading system for programmable graphics hardware, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.159-170, August 2001 [doi>10.1145/383259.383275]
• 32: Todd L. Veldhuizen. C++ Templates as Partial Evaluation. In ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation, 1999.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism