Programming, graphics, games, media, C++, Windows, Internet and more...
Entries for tag "productions", ordered from most recent. Entry count: 132.
# ShaderCrashingAssert - a New Small Library
Sun
20
Aug 2023
Last Thursday (August 17th) AMD released a new tool for post-mortem analysis of GPU crashes: Radeon GPU Detective. I participated in this project, but because this is my personal blog and because it is weekend now, I am wearing my hobby developer hat and I want to present a small library that I developed yesterday:
ShaderCrashingAssert provides an assert-like macro for HLSL shaders that triggers a GPU memory page fault. Together with RGD, it can help with shader debugging.
Comments | #rendering #directx #productions #libraries #gpu #tools Share
# Hello World Under the Microscope - New Article Published
Tue
11
Oct 2022
A Python program that prints "Hello World" on the console - what can be simpler than this? The entire program is:
print("Hello World")
Yet, together with my friends, we wrote a long article about it! When the topic is described by two security researchers skilled in reverse engineering and knowledgeable about the internals of Python interpreter, Windows operating system, and its console, together with a graphics programmer that knows how graphics and text get displayed on the screen, from Direct3D API down to the internals of a graphics card and pixels on the screen, the result is an in-depth description of the long journey this simple command makes in a computer.
The article was originally published in Polish in issue 100 (1/2022) of the Programista magazine in February 2022. Now, we prepared an English translation, and we are allowed to publish it for free on the Internet, so here it is: Hello World under the microscope. You can also download the original Polish version as PDF file or order printed version of the magazine.
Comments | #rendering #productions Share
# D3d12info - Printing D3D12 GPU Information to Console
Wed
27
Jul 2022
My next little hobby project is D3d12info. It is a Windows console program that prints all the information it can get about the current GPU installed in the system, as seen through Direct3D 12 API. It also fetches additional information through AMD GPU Services (on AMD cards), NVAPI (on NVIDIA cards), Vulkan, and WinAPI, mostly to identify the current version of the graphics driver and Windows system. I will try to keep it updated to the latest Agility SDK, to query it for support for the latest hardware features of the graphics card.
I share it under open-source MIT license. You can see full source code in the GitHub repository and download compiled binary from the Releases tab.
The tool can be compared to DirectX Caps Viewer you can find in your Windows SDK installation under path "c:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\*\x64\dxcapsviewer.exe" in terms of the information extracted from DX12. However, instead of GUI, it provides a command-line interface, which makes it similar to the "vulkaninfo" tool. Information is printed in a human-readable text format by default, but JSON format can be selected by providing -j parameter, making it suitable for automated processing. Additional command-line parameters are supported, including a choice of the GPU if there are many installed in the system. Launch it with parameter -h to see the command-line syntax.
In the future, I would like to extend it with a web back-end that would gather a database of various GPUs and driver versions, like Vulkan Hardware Database does for Vulkan, and to make it browsable online. As far as I know, there is no such database for D3D12 at the moment. Best we have right now are the tables about Direct3D Feature Levels on Wikipedia. But that will require a lot of learning from me, as I am not a good web developer, so I will think about it after my vacation :)
Comments | #productions #tools #directx #gpu Share
# SimplySaveAs - a Small Tool for Perforce Users
Wed
29
Jun 2022
In my old article "Tips for Using Perforce" I promised to dedicate a separate article to what I described there in point 10, so here it is. First, let's talk about the problem. When using a version control system, e.g. Git or Perforce, you surely sometimes inspect the history of a file, to see who changed it, when, and what exactly has been changed throughout its previous versions. GUI clients of such systems offer convenient views to compare text files, but sometimes you may just need to save an old version of the file on your disk - not to update it in your main working copy, but to export it to a separate folder.
In some applications, this is easy. For example, Git Extensions, my favorite GUI client for Git, offers File History window that shows revision history of a selected file. In this window, we can right-click on a specific revision from the list and click "Save as" to export that specific version of the file to a new location on disk.
Unfortunately, in Perforce there is no such command. There is History tab that shows the list of revisions of a selected file. It also offers context menu under right mouse button to do something with a selected revision, but among the commands to diff etc. there is no "Save As", only "Open With". This one allows us to choose some application and open the file with it, which might be useful in case of text files or some other documents (e.g. DOCX, PDF) that we just want to preview using their dedicated app. But what if it is a binary file, having some non-standard extension, that we just want to export to disk?
Here is where the little tool I developed might be useful. SimplySaveAs is a Windows program that you can use to "Open With" a file in Perforce. All it does is show a "Save As" window that lets you choose a place and name where the file should be saved on your disk. This way, the external tool provides the command missing in Perforce visual client (P4V).
The program doesn't need any installation. The repository linked above also contains full source code in C++, but all you need to download is just the file "SimplySaveAs.exe". You can put it in any location on your disk. I like to have a separate directory "C:\PortablePrograms\", where I put all the portable applications that don't need installation, like this one.
First time you want to use it, you need to click on Open With > Choose Application... in Perforce and select "SimplySaveAs.exe" from your disk.
On every next use, Perforce will remember this program and show it available in the context menu, so you can just click Open With > SimplySaveAs.
How does it work? As you may know, opening a file with a program actually needs to save the file on a disk somewhere, likely in a temporary folder, and then launching the program with a path to this file passed as a command-line parameter. This is also what Perforce does when we use "Open With" command. So all my program does is ask the user for a target path and then copy the file from the source, temporary location read from the parameter to the target location selected by the user.
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# Vulkan Memory Allocator 3.0.0 and D3D12 Memory Allocator 2.0.0
Sat
26
Mar 2022
Yesterday we released new major version of Vulkan Memory Allocator 3.0.0 and D3D12 Memory Allocator 2.0.0, so if you are coding with Vulkan or Direct3D 12, I recommend to take a look at these libraries. Because coding them is part of my job, I won't describe them in detail here, but just refer to my article published on GPUOpen.com: "Announcing Vulkan Memory Allocator 3.0.0 and Direct3D 12 Memory Allocator 2.0.0". Direct links:
Vulkan Memory Allocator
D3D12 Memory Allocator
Comments | #rendering #directx #vulkan #gpu #libraries #productions Share
# VkExtensionsFeaturesHelp - My New Library
Thu
01
Apr 2021
I had this idea for quite some time and finally I've spent last weekend coding it, so here it is: 611 lines of code (and many times more of documentation), shared for free on MIT license:
** VkExtensionsFeaturesHelp **
Vulkan Extensions & Features Help, or VkExtensionsFeaturesHelp, is a small, header-only, C++ library for developers who use Vulkan API. It helps to avoid boilerplate code while creating VkInstance and VkDevice object by providing a convenient way to query and then enable:
The library provides a domain-specific language to describe the list of required or supported extensions, features, and layers. The language is fully defined in terms of preprocessor macros, so no custom build step is needed.
Any feedback is welcome :)
Comments | #productions #vulkan #rendering Share
# AquaFish 2 - My Game From 2009
Thu
06
Aug 2020
I've made a short video showing a game I developed more than 10 years ago: AquaFish 2. It was my first commercial project, published by Play Publishing, developed using my custom engine The Final Quest.
Comments | #productions #history Share
# Vulkan Memory Allocator - budget management
Wed
06
Nov 2019
Querying for memory budget and staying within the budget is a very needed feature of the Vulkan Memory Allocator library. I implemented prototype of it on a separate branch "MemoryBudget".
It also contains documentation of all new symbols and a general chapter "Staying within budget" that describes this topic. Documentation is pregenerated so it can be accessed by just downloading the repository as ZIP, unpacking, and opening file "docs\html\index.html" > chapter “Staying within budget”.
If you are interested, please take a look. Any feedback is welcomed - you can leave your comment below or send me an e-mail. Now is the best time to adjust this feature to users' needs before it gets into the official release of the library.
Long story short:
VMA_ALLOCATION_CREATE_WITHIN_BUDGET_BIT, which causes the allocation to just return failure if it would go over budget.Update 2019-12-20: This has been merged to master branch and shipped with the latest major release: Vulkan Memory Allocator 2.3.0.