Spark : modular, composable shaders for graphics hardware
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Real-time computer graphics have become a ubiquitous part of modern life. Rich user interfaces and interactive games appear on screens ranging from mobile phones to stereo-3D TVs. Programmable graphics \emph{pipelines} have been central to delivering these compelling experiences. Shaders - programs that describe the shape, movement, and appearance of rendered objects - run in the stages of these pipelines, and are used to define the "look and feel" of a production. The demand for rich, immersive experiences motivates the use of increasingly complex shaders. In creating these complex real-time shaders, programmers should ideally be able to decompose code into independent, localized modules of their choosing. Current real-time shading languages, however, enforce a fixed decomposition into per-pipeline-stage procedures. Program concerns at other scales - including those that cross-cut multiple pipeline stages - cannot be expressed as reusable modules. We present a shading language, Spark, that improves support for separation of concerns into modules. A Spark shader class can encapsulate a program feature that maps to more than one pipeline stage, and can be extended and composed using object-oriented inheritance. We first discuss the design of this language: its origins, goals, and key design choices. We then describe our implementation of a compiler, standard library, and runtime system for Spark, targeting current programmable graphics hardware. Finally, we evaluate this implementation and demonstrate that it achieves our modularity goals without compromising performance: in our tests, shaders written in Spark achieve performance within 2\% of Microsoft's High Level Shading Language (HLSL).
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Foley, Timothy John |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Computer Science Department. |
| Primary advisor | Hanrahan, P. M. (Patrick Matthew) |
| Thesis advisor | Hanrahan, P. M. (Patrick Matthew) |
| Thesis advisor | Aiken, Alexander |
| Thesis advisor | Akeley, Kurt |
| Advisor | Aiken, Alexander |
| Advisor | Akeley, Kurt |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Timothy John Foley. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Computer Science. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2012 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Timothy John Foley
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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