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  • ATI proprietary driver performance?

    - by Axel
    I'm about to (at least, want to..) buy a laptop with an ATI Radeon HD 4250, and I haven't a good opinion on ATI's drivers. How is the actual performance of the open/proprietary driver (currently I have nVidia, and I'm very satisfied)? The intended use for the laptop is: watching videos, programming in Java/PHP/maybe Qt... but, I like to know if Compiz runs well. Yes, I'm a hardcore (?) programmer that uses Compiz. :P Someone has this GPU? Experiences? Thoughts? Thanks! :D

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  • Chrome 23 : meilleure autonomie, accélération matérielle et utilisation simplifiée du « Do-Not-Track »

    Chrome 23 : meilleure autonomie, accélération matérielle Et utilisation du « Do-Not-Track » simplifiée La nouvelle version de Chrome (la 23.0.1271.64) est arrivée cette semaine. Deux fonctionnalités sont mises en avant par Google : une optimisation de l'utilisation des ressources pour améliorer la durée de vie des batteries des appareils nomades et un « Do-Not-Track » (DNT) simplifié. La principale amélioration dans la gestion de la batterie est liée à l'accélération du traitement des flux vidéos par le GPU. « La batterie dure 25% de plus quand l'accélération matérielle est activée », promet Google. Quant au DNT, il suffit de cliquer sur l'icône en forme de cadenas, à gauche...

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  • Disabling depth write trashes the frame buffer on some GPUs

    - by EboMike
    I sometimes disable depth buffer writing via glDepthMask(GL_FALSE) during the alpha rendering of a frame. That works perfectly fine on some GPUs (like the Motorola Droid's PowerVR), but on the HTC EVO with the Adreno GPU for example, I end up with the frame buffer being complete garbage (I see traces of the meshes I rendered somewhere, but the entire screen is mostly trashed). If I force glDepthMask to be true the entire time, everything works fine. I need glDepthMask to be off during parts of the alpha rendering. What can cause the framebuffer to get destroyed by turning the depth writing off? I do clear the depth buffer initially, and the majority of the screen has pixels rendered with depth writing turned on first before I do additional drawing with it turned off.

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  • CUDA 4.0 : sortie de la Release Candidate de l'architecture de calcul parallèle de NVIDIA

    CUDA 4.0 : sortie de la Release Candidate De l'architecture de calcul parallèle de NVIDIA La sortie cette semaine aux développeurs enregistrés de CUDA est l'accomplissement de milliers d'heures dédiées à ce projet. Cette technologie peut sembler jeune, sa première version, la 1.0, n'a été sortie qu'en 2007. L'effet de cette sortie sur le monde entier n'a, sans nul doute possible, pas été nul. Elle n'est pas non plus le seul terrain d'avance pour les technologies massivement parallèles sur matériel NVIDIA : les API comme OpenCL et DirectCompute sont elles aussi supportées et améliorées, en plus d'un accès direct au GPU en C, C++ et Fortran. Comme toujours, NVIDIA est à la recherch...

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  • Geometry instancing in OpenGL ES 2.0

    - by seahorse
    I am planning to do geometry instancing in OpenGL ES 2.0 Basically I plan to render the same geometry(a chair) maybe 1000 times in my scene. What is the best way to do this in OpenGL ES 2.0? I am considering passing model view mat4 as an attribute. Since attributes are per vertex data do I need to pass this same mat4, three times for each vertex of the same triangle(since modelview remains constant across vertices of the triangle). That would amount to a lot of extra data sent to the GPU( 2 extra vertices*16 floats*(Number of triangles) amount of extra data). Or should I be sending the mat4 only once per triangle?But how is that possible using attributes since attributes are defined as "per vertex" data? What is the best and efficient way to do instancing in OpenGL ES 2.0?

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  • Easy to use cross-platform 3D engines for C++ game development?

    - by davr
    I want to try my hand at writing a 3D game. However I don't want to start at such a low level of drawing individual triangles and writing my own 3D object loader and so on. I've heard of things like Irrlicht, Crystal Space 3D, and Cafu, but I don't have any experience with any of them. I'm looking for suggestions from people who have experience with these or other engines on which ones are well written, and are easy to get started using, without having to learn a ton of 3D math theory and how GPU's work internally.

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  • Driver error when using multiple shaders

    - by Jinxi
    I'm using 3 different shaders: a tessellation shader to use the tessellation feature of DirectX11 :) a regular shader to show how it would look without tessellation and a text shader to display debug-info such as FPS, model count etc. All of these shaders are initialized at the beginning. Using the keyboard, I can switch between the tessellation shader and regular shader to render the scene. Additionally, I also want to be able toggle the display of debug-info using the text shader. Since implementing the tessellation shader the text shader doesn't work anymore. When I activate the DebugText (rendered using the text-shader) my screens go black for a while, and Windows displays the following message: Display Driver stopped responding and has recovered This happens with either of the two shaders used to render the scene. Additionally: I can start the application using the regular shader to render the scene and then switch to the tessellation shader. If I try to switch back to the regular shader I get the same error as with the text shader. What am I doing wrong when switching between shaders? What am I doing wrong when displaying text at the same time? What file can I post to help you help me? :) thx P.S. I already checked if my keyinputs interrupt at the wrong time (during render or so..), but that seems to be ok Testing Procedure Regular Shader without text shader Add text shader to Regular Shader by keyinput (works now, I built the text shader back to only vertex and pixel shader) (somthing with the z buffer is stil wrong...) Remove text shader, then change shader to Tessellation Shader by key input Then if I add the Text Shader or switch back to the Regular Shader Switching/Render Shader Here the code snipet from the Renderer.cpp where I choose the Shader according to the boolean "m_useTessellationShader": if(m_useTessellationShader) { // Render the model using the tesselation shader ecResult = m_ShaderManager->renderTessellationShader(m_D3D->getDeviceContext(), meshes[lod_level]->getIndexCount(), worldMatrix, viewMatrix, projectionMatrix, textures, texturecount, m_Light->getDirection(), m_Light->getAmbientColor(), m_Light->getDiffuseColor(), (D3DXVECTOR3)m_Camera->getPosition(), TESSELLATION_AMOUNT); } else { // todo: loaded model depends on distance to camera // Render the model using the light shader. ecResult = m_ShaderManager->renderShader(m_D3D->getDeviceContext(), meshes[lod_level]->getIndexCount(), lod_level, textures, texturecount, m_Light->getDirection(), m_Light->getAmbientColor(), m_Light->getDiffuseColor(), worldMatrix, viewMatrix, projectionMatrix); } And here the code snipet from the Mesh.cpp where I choose the Typology according to the boolean "useTessellationShader": // RenderBuffers is called from the Render function. The purpose of this function is to set the vertex buffer and index buffer as active on the input assembler in the GPU. Once the GPU has an active vertex buffer it can then use the shader to render that buffer. void Mesh::renderBuffers(ID3D11DeviceContext* deviceContext, bool useTessellationShader) { unsigned int stride; unsigned int offset; // Set vertex buffer stride and offset. stride = sizeof(VertexType); offset = 0; // Set the vertex buffer to active in the input assembler so it can be rendered. deviceContext->IASetVertexBuffers(0, 1, &m_vertexBuffer, &stride, &offset); // Set the index buffer to active in the input assembler so it can be rendered. deviceContext->IASetIndexBuffer(m_indexBuffer, DXGI_FORMAT_R32_UINT, 0); // Check which Shader is used to set the appropriate Topology // Set the type of primitive that should be rendered from this vertex buffer, in this case triangles. if(useTessellationShader) { deviceContext->IASetPrimitiveTopology(D3D11_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_3_CONTROL_POINT_PATCHLIST); }else{ deviceContext->IASetPrimitiveTopology(D3D11_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_TRIANGLELIST); } return; } RenderShader Could there be a problem using sometimes only vertex and pixel shader and after switching using vertex, hull, domain and pixel shader? Here a little overview of my architecture: TextClass: uses font.vs and font.ps deviceContext-VSSetShader(m_vertexShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetShader(m_pixelShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetSamplers(0, 1, &m_sampleState); RegularShader: uses vertex.vs and pixel.ps deviceContext-VSSetShader(m_vertexShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetShader(m_pixelShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetSamplers(0, 1, &m_sampleState); TessellationShader: uses tessellation.vs, tessellation.hs, tessellation.ds, tessellation.ps deviceContext-VSSetShader(m_vertexShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-HSSetShader(m_hullShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-DSSetShader(m_domainShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetShader(m_pixelShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetSamplers(0, 1, &m_sampleState); ClearState I'd like to switch between 2 shaders and it seems they have different context parameters, right? In clearstate methode it says it resets following params to NULL: I found following in my Direct3D Class: depth-stencil state - m_deviceContext-OMSetDepthStencilState rasterizer state - m_deviceContext-RSSetState(m_rasterState); blend state - m_device-CreateBlendState viewports - m_deviceContext-RSSetViewports(1, &viewport); I found following in every Shader Class: input/output resource slots - deviceContext-PSSetShaderResources shaders - deviceContext-VSSetShader to - deviceContext-PSSetShader input layouts - device-CreateInputLayout sampler state - device-CreateSamplerState These two I didn't understand, where can I find them? predications - ? scissor rectangles - ? Do I need to store them all localy so I can switch between them, because it doesn't feel right to reinitialize the Direct3d and the Shaders by every switch (key input)?!

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  • Portal Ported to a Graphing Calculator

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    It’s not exactly a 3D-rendered GPU-burner, but this calculator-based version of Portal still features the same portal-jumping tricks that delighted players in the original game. Built using Axe Parser, an advanced programming language for graphing calculators, Portal: Prelude is part an experiment in pushing the limits of Axe Parser and part long standing tradition of porting popular video games to graphing calculators. You can read more about Axe Parser and the many games and program projects under development using it here. [via Geeks Are Sexy] How to Fix a Stuck Pixel on an LCD Monitor How to Factory Reset Your Android Phone or Tablet When It Won’t Boot Our Geek Trivia App for Windows 8 is Now Available Everywhere

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  • No signal to monitor after driver install

    - by Hossam Riyad
    After installing 10.10 I used Hardware Drivers (Jockey) to install the graphics driver v11.2 for my ATI HD 5770. After restarting to activate the driver all went well and the boot screen showed up but not like the normal one the text was rough on the edges and after the boot finished the screen turned black and no signal. I have found some forum discussions about that issue but no fix worked for me. I use a DVI to VGA adapter and I have a View Sonic E70F CRT monitor. PC specs CPU: Intel Q8300 2.5/4 GPU: ATI Powercolor HD5770 1GB MB: Gigabyte EP43-UD3L RAM: 4GB 1066 Kingston

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  • how to get adobe flash fullscreen video fluid with an atom processor?

    - by Antoine Rodriguez
    My system has an atom N270 + intel i915 graphic card. Under Windows I can enjoy 720p bigbuckbunny youtube video fullscreen without any trouble. Under Ubuntu 12.04 I have laggy and choppy fullscreen video and choppy video when not fullscreen. I've seen that under ubuntu the cpu is almost always at 100% use. What I must do in order to have videos playing well under ubuntu ? I've already tried the following : Force flash gpu detection : (no result) : mkdir /etc/adobe echo "OverrideGPUValidation = 1" | sudo tee -a /etc/adobe/mms.cfg grub options (had results but not enough) : i915_enable_rc6=1 i915_enable_fbc=1 i915_lvds_downclock=1 pcie_aspm=force updated intel drivers (glasen ppa) Using chrome instead of firefox (had impact but not enough)

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  • NVIDIA Geforce gt 555m driver install problem

    - by mir
    I recently installed ubuntu 12.04 on my asus N55SF, which runs nvidia geforce gt 555m and an integrated graphics, via optimus but after installation i found no such thing on ubuntu. i went o nvidia website and installed the driver from there(ver 259.59 i guess) after reboot, i was stuck at 640x480 resolution and my card was still undetected i reinstalled ubuntu but this time i installed bumblebee, but the system settings still shows the graphics as 'unknown' i dont know whether the driver has been installed or not, but from the 'unknown' i figure its not there. when i run sudo nvidia-settings i get this msg "You do not appear to be using the NVIDIA X driver. Please edit your X configuration file (just run nvidia-xconfig as root), and restart the X server." however i can run the settings page by sudo nvidia-settins -c :8 i just want to know why ubuntu hasnt still detected the gpu? is it because bumblebee disables it? and i forgot one v important thing..I AM A NOOB :(

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  • Bumblebee - Poor performance with games

    - by user106880
    I have an Alienware M14x (GeForce 650m with Optimus) and got Bumblebee working correctly (trying to get ready for steam for linux :)). Also I'm running Ubuntu 12.10 with Unity. I get great framerates with glxgears and sauerbraten (a game on the repositories), but when I run games like Bastion and Splice, I get pretty terrible framerate, in fact worse than my integrated intel gpu. I have nvidia-current installed under ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates so it's driver version 310.xx. Also I forgot to add that I haven't been able to test other drivers because they seem to break glx (x can't load the glx module). I've been troubleshooting this for days now, and I'm very nearly out of ideas. Any hints on why only some games are running so poorly with bumblebee?

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  • chromium-browser --proxy-server debugging

    - by user3678068
    Many places online have pointed out to configure chromium proxy via command can be achieve with the following line chromium-browser --proxy-server=[username]:[password]@[host]:[port] but I got this result on every request. Here's the output in the command line right after executing the previous command. (They do not appear to be relevant. There are no new command line output when I try to visit a page) libGL error: failed to authenticate magic 30 libGL error: failed to load driver: vboxvideo ATTENTION: default value of option force_s3tc_enable overridden by environment. [29551:29551:0606/160459:ERROR:sandbox_linux.cc(268)] InitializeSandbox() called with multiple threads in process gpu-process I have double checked that the proxy credential works with the foxyproxy chrome plugin. What else can I try to figure this out? [Edit] Going to chrome://net-internals/#proxy and reading "Effective proxy settings" if I do chromium-browser with no flags, I get Use DIRECT connections. Source: GSETTINGS if chromium-browser --proxy-server=[host]:[port], I get a message box requesting to login, and under "Effective proxy settings": Proxy server: [host]:[port] if chromium-browser --proxy-server=[user]:[pass]@[host]:[port], "Effective proxy settings" shows: Use DIRECT connections

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  • "Unable to create OpenGL 3.3 context (flags 0, profile 1)"

    - by Tsvetan
    Trying to run any of the well-known McKesson's tutorials on a friend's laptop results in the aforementioned exception. I read that in order to run applications which use OpenGL 3.3 you must at least have an ATI HD or Nvidia 8xxx GPU series. He has an ATI HD class graphics processor which eliminates (maybe) this issue. Also, I read that this error may result in having old drivers. He updated his drivers but that didn't solve the problem. The tutorials are built as said in the book introduction and glsdk is installed. If more information is needed, say so and I will provide it. What are the other reasons for this kind of exception? And how can I fix them?

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  • Using a DisplayLink USB video adapter on Ubuntu 12.10

    - by Jason R
    The line of USB video adapters made by DisplayLink has a somewhat sordid history under Linux. In past Ubuntu releases, the process of getting them to work has been somewhat difficult, inspiring a number of past questions on this site: example 1 example 2 example 3 However, there are some indications that version 3.5 of the Linux kernel (which is used by 12.10) contains better support for these adapters, which should make them easier to use. I currently have a single-GPU machine (it is an Nvidia adapter) with dual monitor outputs. I would like to add the DisplayLink adapter to drive a third external monitor. How can I set this up on Ubuntu 12.10?

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  • gstreamer vaapi problem

    - by squallbayu
    I installed gstreamer-vaapi from this PPA : ppa:guido-iodice/video sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-vaapi libgstvaapi-x11-0 libgstvaapi0 but, if I run totem movie player (via terminal) it's show this error : (totem:3383): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: g_object_set_valist: object class 'TotemScrsaver' has no property named 'reason' (totem:3383): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: value "10752000" of type 'guint' is invalid or out of range for property 'connection-speed' of type 'guint' libva: libva version 0.31.0 Xlib: extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0". libva: va_getDriverName() returns 0 libva: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so libva error: /usr/lib/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so init failed libva: va_openDriver() returns -1 Segmentation fault It's seems I get wrong nvidia_drv_video.so. What should I do? If I uninstall it, it's work fine, but I want to use this vaapi backend for my video decoding via GPU while I run gstreamer based apps. PS : I use Ubuntu Lucid 64bit and MSI CR 400 Notebook : Intel Core 2 Duo Nvidia 8200M

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  • Installed nvidia driver, activated it, and now Unity is gone. No bars, menus, nothing

    - by Noel
    I installed the nvidia driver (installed the ubuntu-x-swat ones, updated them, got the updates for them, installed bumblebee. I restarted everytime I did those steps, so no, i don't simply need to 'restart X'. I tried to run things using bumblebee, but bumblebee was like "can't access GPU driver". So I ran nvidia-settings, it said the drivers weren't in use, so I ran "sudo nvidia-xconfig", then restarted. Now, my login screen looks differently than it did before: it asks me if I want to load: "GNOME, GNOME - no effects, Cairo Dock - GNOME, System Default, or Ubuntu" when I log in, but WORST OF ALL: i no longer have any kind of GNOME/unity GUI. There are no title bars above any windows, no close/minimize/maximize buttons. The unity bar is gone, and will not show up when I call it. And the top status bar is also no longer there.

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  • How do I make Powertop changes permanent?

    - by arno
    I'm on a Compaq 615 and it's fan is loud as hell. Not much you can do about that but I'm trying to keep the CPU/GPU as cool as possible. This is what Powertop has to say: If I change all of them to "good", the changes don't survive a reboot. Also, upon exiting Powertop I get this: Loaded 8 prior measurements Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop Leaving PowerTOP I added the line to the "grub"-file as suggested here Upon closing gedit I get this: (gedit:2728): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to store changes into `/root/.local/share/recently-used.xbel', but failed: Datei »/root/.local/share/recently-used.xbel.9CIMAW« konnte nicht angelegt werden: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden The part in German says: Couldn't be created: File or directory not found.

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  • Calculate an AABB for bone animated model

    - by Byte56
    I have a model that has its initial bounding box calculated by finding the maximum and minimum on the x, y and z axes. Producing a correct result like so: The vertices are then stored in a VBO and only altered with matrices for rotation and bone animation. Currently the bounds are not updated when the model is altered. So the animated and rotated model has bounds like so: (Maybe it's hard to tell, but the bounds are the same as before, and don't accurately represent the rotated/animated model) So my question is, how can I calculate the bounding box using the armature matrices and rotation/translation matrices for each model? Keep in mind the modified vertex data is not available because those calculations are performed on the GPU in the shader. The end result I want is to have an accurate AABB the represents the animated model for picking/basic collision checks.

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  • Bumblebee : Module bbswitch could not be loaded

    - by StepTNT
    I've upgraded to 12.04 and I had to switch from Ironhide to the latest version of Bumblebee. Now, when I try to run bumblebeed, I get this error: FATAL: Module bbswitch not found. [ERROR]Module bbswitch could not be loaded (timeout?) [WARN]No switching method available. The dedicated card will always be on. I don't really need to use the secondary VGA on Kubuntu, so I would like to find a way to definitely shut the discrete GPU down and avoid wasting battery. I can't disable it from the BIOS because I use it on Windows. My card is an nvidia 540M.

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  • How can I pass an array of floats to the fragment shader using textures?

    - by James
    I want to map out a 2D array of depth elements for the fragment shader to use to check depth against to create shadows. I want to be able to copy a float array into the GPU, but using large uniform arrays causes segfaults in openGL so that is not an option. I tried texturing but the best i got was to use GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, 512, 512, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_FLOAT, smap); Which doesn't work because that stores depth components (0.0 - 1.0) which I don't want because I have no idea how to calculate them using the depth value produced by the light sources MVP matrix multiplied by the coordinate of each vertex. Is there any way to store and access large 2D arrays of floats in openGL?

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  • Internet Explorer 9 At MIX10

    Check out this great Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) video interview from this years MIX10 conference. John Hrvatin is a Lead Microsoft PM on the IE9 Project. Johns a smart guy who patiently answered all my questions about IE9. Thanks John! I highly recommend watching this video to see why IE9 sounds so exciting: In the video, John demos IE9 and openly discusses: IE9 Features and performance HTML5 support Gives a IE9 demo Explains new IE9 JavaScript engine (JIT, Multicore, GPU Powered)...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • My Red Gate Experience

    - by Colin Rothwell
    I’m Colin, and I’ve been an intern working with Mike in publishing on Simple-Talk and SQLServerCentral for the past ten weeks. I’ve mostly been working “behind the scenes”, making improvements to the spam filtering, along with various other small tweaks. When I arrived at Red Gate, one of the first things Mike asked me was what I wanted to get out of the internship. It wasn’t a question I’d given a great deal of thought to, but my immediate response was the same as almost anybody: to support my growing family. Well, ok, not quite that, but money was certainly a motivator, along with simply making sure that I didn’t get bored over the summer. Three months is a long time to fill, and many of my friends end up getting bored, or worse, knitting obsessively. With the arrogance which seems fairly common among Cambridge people, I wasn’t expecting to really learn much here! In my mind, the part of the year where I am at Uni is the part where I learn things, whilst Red Gate would be an opportunity to apply what I’d learnt. Thankfully, the opposite is true: I’ve learnt a lot during my time here, and there has been a definite positive impact on the way I write code. The first thing I’ve really learnt is that test-driven development is, in general, a sensible way of working. Before coming, I didn’t really get it: how could you test something you hadn’t yet written? It didn’t make sense! My problem was seeing a test as having to test all the behaviour of a given function. Writing tests which test the bare minimum possible and building them up is a really good way of crystallising the direction the code needs to grow in, and ensures you never attempt to write too much code at time. One really good experience of this was early on in my internship when Mike and I were working on the query used to list active authors: I’d written something which I thought would do the trick, but by starting again using TDD we grew something which revealed that there were several subtle mistakes in the query I’d written. I’ve also been awakened to the value of pair programming. Whilst I could sort of see the point before coming, I also thought that it was impossible that two people would ever get more done at the same computer than if they were working separately. I still think that this is true for projects with pieces that developers can easily work on independently, and with developers who both know the codebase, but I’ve found that pair programming can be really good for learning a code base, and for building up small projects to the point where you can start working on separate components, as well as solving particularly difficult problems. Later on in my internship, for my down tools week project, I was working on adding Python support to Glimpse. Another intern and I we pair programmed the entire project, using ping pong pair programming as much as possible. One bonus that this brought which I wasn’t expecting was that I found myself less prone to distraction: with someone else peering over my shoulder, I didn’t have the ever-present temptation to open gmail, or facebook, or yammer, or twitter, or hacker news, or reddit, and so on, and so forth. I’m quite proud of this project: I think it’s some of the best code I’ve written. I’ve also been really won over to the value of descriptive variables names. In my pre-Red Gate life, as a lone-ranger style cowboy programmer, I’d developed a tendency towards laziness in variable names, sometimes abbreviating or, worse, using acronyms. I’ve swiftly realised that this is a bad idea when working with a team: saving a few key strokes is inevitably not worth it when it comes to reading code again in the future. Longer names also mean you can do away with a majority of comments. I appreciate that if you’ve come up with an O(n*log n) algorithm for something which seemed O(n^2), you probably want to explain how it works, but explaining what a variable name means is a big no no: it’s so very easy to change the behaviour of the code, whilst forgetting about the comments. Whilst at Red Gate, I took the opportunity to attend a code retreat, which really helped me to solidify all the things I’d learnt. To be completely free of any existing code base really lets you focus on best practises and think about how you write code. If you get a chance to go on a similar event, I’d highly recommend it! Cycling to Red Gate, I’ve also become much better at fitting inner tubes: if you’re struggling to get the tube out, or re-fit the tire, letting a bit of air out usually helps. I’ve also become quite a bit better at foosball and will miss having a foosball table! I’d like to finish off by saying thank you to everyone at Red Gate for having me. I’ve really enjoyed working with, and learning from, the team that brings you this web site. If you meet any of them, buy them a drink!

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  • Determine percentage of screen covered by an object without using frustum culling

    - by Meltac
    On the CPU-side of an 3D first-person / ego perspective game I need to check whether what the players currently sees on screen is the inside of a box object defined by world space coordinates (the player might be outside of that box but on screen sees only/mostly the inside of the box, or vice-versa, looks from within the box to the outside). The "casual" way of performing such a check would incorporate frustum culling but such an approach would be hard to achieve with my given set of engine parameters which I'd like to avoid if there is a simpler way. What I actually have at the point where I would like to do the check (high-level script on CPU, not GPU side): Camera world position Camera direction Camera FOV Two Box corner world coordinates (left-bottom-front, right-top-back) What I do not have right away: View frustrum definition (near/far plane or say 6 planes defining frustum) Any specific pixel information (uv, view space position, depth or the like) What I would like to calculate: Percentage of screen "covered" by box. Any hints on how to perform such calculation?

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  • The Joy Of Hex

    - by Jim Giercyk
    While working on a mainframe integration project, it occurred to me that some basic computer concepts are slipping into obscurity. For example, just about anyone can tell you that a 64-bit processor is faster than a 32-bit processer. A grade school child could tell you that a computer “speaks” in ‘1’s and ‘0’s. Some people can even tell you that there are 8 bits in a byte. However, I have found that even the most seasoned developers often can’t explain the theory behind those statements. That is not a knock on programmers; in the age of IntelliSense, what reason do we have to work with data at the bit level? Many computer theory classes treat bit-level programming as a thing of the past, no longer necessary now that storage space is plentiful. The trouble with that mindset is that the world is full of legacy systems that run programs written in the 1970’s.  Today our jobs require us to extract data from those systems, regardless of the format, and that often involves low-level programming. Because it seems knowledge of the low-level concepts is waning in recent times, I thought a review would be in order.       CHARACTER: See Spot Run HEX: 53 65 65 20 53 70 6F 74 20 52 75 6E DECIMAL: 83 101 101 32 83 112 111 116 32 82 117 110 BINARY: 01010011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01010011 01110000 01101111 01110100 00100000 01010010 01110101 01101110 In this example, I have broken down the words “See Spot Run” to a level computers can understand – machine language.     CHARACTER:  The character level is what is rendered by the computer.  A “Character Set” or “Code Page” contains 256 characters, both printable and unprintable.  Each character represents 1 BYTE of data.  For example, the character string “See Spot Run” is 12 Bytes long, exclusive of the quotation marks.  Remember, a SPACE is an unprintable character, but it still requires a byte.  In the example I have used the default Windows character set, ASCII, which you can see here:  http://www.asciitable.com/ HEX:  Hex is short for hexadecimal, or Base 16.  Humans are comfortable thinking in base ten, perhaps because they have 10 fingers and 10 toes; fingers and toes are called digits, so it’s not much of a stretch.  Computers think in Base 16, with numeric values ranging from zero to fifteen, or 0 – F.  Each decimal place has a possible 16 values as opposed to a possible 10 values in base 10.  Therefore, the number 10 in Hex is equal to the number 16 in Decimal.  DECIMAL:  The Decimal conversion is strictly for us humans to use for calculations and conversions.  It is much easier for us humans to calculate that [30 – 10 = 20] in decimal than it is for us to calculate [1E – A = 14] in Hex.  In the old days, an error in a program could be found by determining the displacement from the entry point of a module.  Since those values were dumped from the computers head, they were in hex. A programmer needed to convert them to decimal, do the equation and convert back to hex.  This gets into relative and absolute addressing, a topic for another day.  BINARY:  Binary, or machine code, is where any value can be expressed in 1s and 0s.  It is really Base 2, because each decimal place can have a possibility of only 2 characters, a 1 or a 0.  In Binary, the number 10 is equal to the number 2 in decimal. Why only 1s and 0s?  Very simply, computers are made up of lots and lots of transistors which at any given moment can be ON ( 1 ) or OFF ( 0 ).  Each transistor is a bit, and the order that the transistors fire (or not fire) is what distinguishes one value from  another in the computers head (or CPU).  Consider 32 bit vs 64 bit processing…..a 64 bit processor has the capability to read 64 transistors at a time.  A 32 bit processor can only read half as many at a time, so in theory the 64 bit processor should be much faster.  There are many more factors involved in CPU performance, but that is the fundamental difference.    DECIMAL HEX BINARY 0 0 0000 1 1 0001 2 2 0010 3 3 0011 4 4 0100 5 5 0101 6 6 0110 7 7 0111 8 8 1000 9 9 1001 10 A 1010 11 B 1011 12 C 1100 13 D 1101 14 E 1110 15 F 1111   Remember that each character is a BYTE, there are 2 HEX characters in a byte (called nibbles) and 8 BITS in a byte.  I hope you enjoyed reading about the theory of data processing.  This is just a high-level explanation, and there is much more to be learned.  It is safe to say that, no matter how advanced our programming languages and visual studios become, they are nothing more than a way to interpret bits and bytes.  There is nothing like the joy of hex to get the mind racing.

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