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Inferno
Sunday, August 5, 2007 | Permalink
Executable
Source code
Inferno.zip (1.0 MB)
Required:Direct3D 10This demo uses a couple of interesting features of Direct3D10. It doesn't use any vertex or index buffers at all (except for what the framework uses for GUI), instead everything is generated in the shader from the SV_VertexID and SV_InstanceID system generated values. The skybox has only tree vertices (fullscreen triangle), so by generating that in the shader we avoid the API overhead of binding buffers (which is not the bottleneck of a skybox pass of course, but that's besides the point). The terrain renders instanced triangle strips which read from height from a heightmap. The heightmap is in BC4 format, or ATI1N as it was called in D3D9. This gives us a very compact geometric representation for the terrain. There are 1024 particle systems, all rendered in a single draw call by using instancing. The particle systems are stateless and are generated entirely in the vertex shader from the input vertex and instance IDs. The geometry shader is used to expand the incoming points from the vertex shader into quads in screen-space. This is similar to how point sprites used to work, except it's more flexible and this demo uses rotation on the particles, something that point sprite can't do.
This demo should run on Radeon HD 2000 series and GeForce 8000 series. Since this demo uses D3D10 it only works in Windows Vista.
