Real-Time Rendering, Third Edition is the new reference for you people out there that want to learn how real time graphics is done. Read more after the jump.

So I finally received my copy of Real-Time Rendering, Third Edition : Thank you Eric !

There are so many books out there about 3D and real time, but there’s only few that are actually worth buying and that contain so many informations about how graphics is done in a modern graphic hardware and in modern applications.

Actually if there’s a new hire at our company, that’s probably the only book I would recommend (well I used to recommend the second edition) especially if they’re new to graphics and don’t have first hand experience with graphics hardware (yeah that’s what we do).

So what can you learn in this new edition :

• Case studies from the XBox360 GPU, PS3 RSX, Mali 200 and future hardware
• A primer on graphics pipeline, performance investigation and optimization technique
• Survey on collision detection techniques and acceleration structures, as well as linear algebra refresh
• Texturing, shading, lighting, shadowing, antialiasing, high dynamic range, and much more

So basically if you’ve been visiting In a coder’s mind, and found the articles interesting then that book is probably made for you !

Where to order :

Real-Time Rendering, Third Edition

The experiment I ran was to add something to the form that would use the fact that most robots are not human and so don’t read or understand labels (and humans do, at least I hope my readers are in this category). So I decided against Captcha because I don’t really find it an exhilarating experience having to decipher captcha every once in a while (but I understand the reason to). I thought that for my small audience website, spammers would not want to spend time to tailor their robots to decipher labels and so I just put the default label of the contact form to be “Just spam”. While the text on the contact form and the label make it hopefully self-evident that you should NOT use this category, bots don’t read/understand those.

As a result, Drupal my web script is redirecting form requests based on the label to my catch all spam address or my regular website contact address.

I realize all the shortcomings of such a method of course. I haven’t had false positive (yet), but somebody not reading instructions or not understanding english well could be fooled. Also if such a method becomes widespread (I hope not), it will become less efficicient than captcha or heuristic based anti-spam mechanism (and less costly to circumvent). So I may just buying me time, but since it is so low tech and the cost of implementing this was near zero, it may be worth it for now.

Please add your comments and tell me what spam circumventing methods you added to your website.

Now what does it matter to me ?

Well Tron was one of those movies that imprinted my mind when I was a child. It really gave us a glimpse of the future of graphics and by a set of coincidence (or is it ?) here I am some 20 years later working in a computer graphics related field.

Now the original movie didn’t pan so well according to some reports, even though it gained kind of a cult status, considered a precursor by people working in the field opening the road of the likes of Pixar, yet it had a weak script, a kind of unbelievable story, some cheesy 80s designs, but the magic was there nonetheless. I remember buying the novelization and staring at the pictures taken from the movie they were so incredible to me :).

So can you continue to impress so many years later ? With a bit of a chance the film will be given a proper script, and the many people who finally saw it through the reruns, the vhs and dvd releases will talk their peers into seeing it, etc so it might be a win or a big expectation for Disney this time. Of course computer graphics in movies are now the norm, so much that it’s worth mentionning today when a movie features some old school effects like stop motion, animatronics, prosthetics or any of the visual tricks that were used before.No matter what the work they put into the film it’s hard to see how the renewed graphics will impress the younger crowd. In the worst case scenario, Disney will use the movie as as way to push toys and video games. But we’ll see.

Now back to the trailer.

The teaser more exactly opens as a blue guy in the famous tron looking environment is being chased by the yellow guy.The game arena seems to have been upgraded to feature transparent grounds, as well as being now three dimensional, with many ways to pass each other. The blue guy seems to have an upper hand for a while but suddenly, the yellow guy manage to jump from a cliff, land just before him and close his path with a yellow wall. The blue guy crashes in slow motion and lands in a very difficult spot. The yellow guy approaches now off his vehicle, we see his face some kind of holographic projection in his suit, and as the blue guy says “Ok you win, it’s only a game !”, the yellow guy tell him “not anymore” and delivers a blow..In between the scene we see glimpses of what seems the real world where the familiar face of Jeff Bridges (Flynn in the original movie) looks at the scene from his desk. Fade to black, TR2N logo (see the image above).

The teaser while taken with a shaky camera in a very bad spot, is being chased down anyway by the Disney lawyers so you need to apply some search foo to be able to see it but it may be worth it if you were a fan of the first movie. Next images will not arrive before another year !

Stay tuned !

I had been looking for something like that for a long time, some hard data on the power consumption of the new model of Playstation 3 (40GB that was released in November 2007)

So here it is : New revisions of Playstation3 and Xbox

The summary, it will go up to 157 in usage, and stay around 130 at minimum usage. It is a definite better looking deal than with the previous models that could end up to 200 Watts power consumption under load. Yet you still have a lot to gain to turn it off whenever you don’t use it.

How does it compare to everything else ? A rather mid/high end desktop computer such as the one I use in my home (geforce 7800 GT, amd64 dual core cpu, mid tower, a 21″ CRT) would be close to 200 Watts in charge including the CRT monitor. Of course assuming you didn’t go crazy with SLI, quad cores and the like. My current laptop is closer to 50 watts in charge, 20 watts idle (dual core intel cpu, geforce 8500 class gpu, integrated LCD). So whenever I’m not doing anything computing power hungry like typing this note, I would use my laptop and shut down my desktop computer.

Anyway a PS3 is still closer in consumption to a mid end desktop computer than an electronic appliance (if for example you bought it to watch blu ray discs). Hopefully they will still work to improve that in the future with the introduction of the 65 nm or less versions of the chips that would consume less energy (the current 40GB still uses 90nm chips).

The Wii from Nintendo is still unbeatable in term of power consumption, but of course if things were just interchangeable the world would be simpler..