GPH 580: Hardware Shading Techniques

This class explores the current trends in programmable computer graphics hardware. Modern graphics processing units (GPU's) are becoming increasingly powerful and fully programmable parallel processing units. They make extremely sophisticated effects in computer graphics, such as shadows, displacement maps, skinning, motion blur, reflections and refractions, possible in real-time scenes. In addition these increasingly general programmable units are being used for far more general computing problems from traditional searching and sorting algorithms to computational problems in physics such as the diffusion equation and fluid flow. In this course we will explore the applications of hardware shading to computer graphics, including advanced lighting, shading and surface effects. As time allows, we will explore other applications such as physics and computer science. Prerequisites: GPH 469 or GAM 470