Course Syllabus

Course: CIS 665 Real-Time Graphics Architecture Techniques
Meeting Times: Mondays 6-9pm

Instructor:
Gary J. Katz
gkatz@seas.upenn.edu

Office Hours:
Place: Will be held in HMS lab.
Time: By Appointment

TA:
Joe Kider
kiderj@seas.upenn.edu
Office Hours 3 - 4:30pm Thursday in HMS
(lower part of the lab or conference room) or email for appointment

Prerequisites: CIS 462/562, CIS 560. Students are also expected to have a working knowledge of C or C++.

Text: Most reading material will be taken from papers and articles that will be handed out during the term. Books to be referenced are listed below:

Shader X3
Shader X4
Shader X5
GPU Gems I
GPU Gems II

Suggested Text:
The CG Tutorial

Grading: The course will be based upon 3-4 assignments and one final project

Course Objectives:

• Students will gain an understanding of the current state of art in programmable graphics cards. Students will learn how the graphics pipeline has developed overtime and gain an understanding of where programmable graphics is moving in the future.
• Students will learn to program the graphics pipeline using high level languages such as HLSL or CG. The goal is to provide the student with programming experience with streaming processor languages despite current active development of such languages.
• The course will provide an introduction into various graphics effects that are being performed on graphics cards for today’s games. The goal is to start to fill the student’s ‘toolbox’ of techniques and provide an understanding for the implementation of game rendering and animation algorithms being performed on GPUs.
• The course will cover some general purpose applications for the GPU (GPGPU). GPUs are many factors faster than current CPUs. For this reason they are being applied to many applications far removed from graphics.

Lectures:

1. 1/8/06
1. Opening GPU Programming and Architecture
2. Understanding the Graphics Pipeline
3. HOMEWORK 1
2. 1/22/06

1. The Programmable Pipeline
2. CG
3. Ping Ponging
4. HOMEWORK 1 Due
5. HOMEWORK 2
2. 1/29/06

1. VBO, PBO
2. Transferring textures from Pixel Buffer to Vertex Buffer
3. Reflections on bumpy surfaces
4. Rendering semitransparent layered material
3. 2/5/06

1. Sorting and Searching
2. Matrix Operations
3. HOMEWORK 2 DUE
4. 2/12/06

1. DirectX 10
2. CUDA
3. HOMEWORK 3
5. 2/19/06

1. Morphing and Animation
2. Skin Rendering
6. 2/26/06

1. Shadows
2. Slab Ops

3/2/06 Homework 3 Due

8. 3/5/06 NO CLASS Spring Break
9. 3/12/06
1. Physics
2. Collision Detection
3. BEGIN STUDENT PROJECTS
10. 3/19/06

1. Guest Lecture Mike Hakos, Modeling and Simulation
2. Particle Systems
10. 3/26/06

1. FFT
2. Optimizations
11. 4/2/06

1. Parallax Mapping
2. Guest Lecturer Milo Martin, Cell Processor
3. Project Check Up
12. 4/9/06

1. Real-time Global Illumination
13. 4/16/06

1. Hair Rendering
2. Future Trends