Seven graphics-related things gathered up over the past months that I thought worth passing on:

• Nanite presentation from people at Unreal at SIGGRAPH 2021. Quite involved by the end, and it gets over my head without further reading on my part (e.g., “Tetrapuzzles”), but gives you a sense of how Unreal’s Nanite system works. I particularly liked how they go through alternatives for presenting worlds with massive amounts of detail, ruling out each in turn. Also, Slide 81 and thereabouts is pretty fascinating, that their scheme (visibility buffer for tiny polygons) is faster with “software” (compute shaders on the GPU) than “hardware” (traditional GPU) rasterization. (Updated: thanks, Olivier Groulx, for the correction! Me, I dislike saying “software vs. hardware,” as the slide does – both methods are controlled by software and run on hardware.)
• The nanite presentation is just one of many from the SIGGRAPH 2021 Advances in Real-Time Rendering for Games course. And for much more that was at (virtual) SIGGRAPH, see Stephen Hill’s wonderful SIGGRAPH 2021 links page.
• GPU Zen 2 is now just $2.99 for the Kindle version. See the table of contents (and some article teasers) here, code here, and a free article here, “Writing an Efficient Vulkan Renderer.”
• Samsung announced ray tracing support for upcoming mobile devices.
• Free models? Here’s another small site, Poly Haven. I’ve update this site’s Portal Page with it (item #18 in the list).
• Finally, Doom can be played on a pregnancy test.
• The last time “teapot” was mentioned in this blog was 2014. Until now, I hadn’t noticed the sometimes-yearly University of Utah Teapot Rendering Competition. Normally I like to end these quick posts with a picture – just click that link instead for a little treat of (Halloween, I guess) eye candy.