Release 1.18 - October 18th, 2018 - Animation System Ozz support | Vulkan native Ubuntu Linux package support

• The Forge now uses the Ozz animation system. This is our first major change to the math library because we needed to add what is necessary for animation. We compared the speed of our math library then with the speed of the Ozz animation system math library and they are about the same. At some point we need to do AVX 1 and ARM specific optimizations to our math library, which is still based on the open-sourced changed Sony math library Vectormath, which is similar to the Bullet math library ...

A screenshot of the PC version:

Here are shots of four of the supported platforms:

PC Windows 10 Vulkan 1.1.77 GeForce 1080 Driver 399.07 with a resolution of 2560x1440 in full-screen:

Linux Vulkan 1.1.82.1 RADEON 480 Driver 18.30 with a resolution of 1920x1080 in full-screen:

iMac with AMD RADEON 580 (Part No. MNED2xx/A) with resolution of 5120x2880 in full-screen:

iPhone 7 with iOS 12.0 (16A366) and a resolution of 1334 x 750 in full-screen:

XBOX One:

We added several unit tests for Ozz. Please find descriptions below.

• Extended the file system for all platforms, making it more consistent to use and more functional
• Tabified - tabified the whole code base ... finally ...
• glTF - we made sure glTF 2.0 support is improved in the latest assimp we use. This should allow us in the future to use glTF 2.0 art assets easier
• Linux / Vulkan - we applaud Khronos for the native Ubuntu Linux package for all the elements of the Vulkan SDK LunarG Vulkan SDK Packages for Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 and will support those from now on. This is something that makes gaming on Linux Ubuntu easier to approach for end-users.
• macOS
  • we have a hard time to get the "Wave Intrinsics unit test" running. It runs now on our MacBook Pro test machines with Intel GPUs but not on the iMacs with AMD GPUs. It throws compile errors on the iPhone 7. We are providing Apple with info on their bug tracker.
  • upgraded to Xcode Version: 10.0 (10A255) and MacOS Version: 10.14 (18A389)
• iOS
  • there are numerous improvements for the input system, imGUI and other things
  • support shader includes on iOS like on the other platforms
• Android Pie & Vulkan 1.1 - we are waiting for devkits with better driver support before we move on with this target platform
• XBOX One - see internal GitLab list for improvements as usual ...

Release 1.17 - October 4th, 2018 - Android Pie & Vulkan 1.1 Support | iOS imGUI touch & virtual keyboard | DXR Ray Tracing support | Call for contributors to change IRenderer.h

• The Forge now has initial support for Android with the same Vulkan 1.1 run-time that is used by the Windows and Linux platforms.

There are only a few phones that support Vulkan 1.1. We developed and support the
Essential Phone.
This phone uses an Adreno 540 GPU and can be obtained relatively cheap and unlocked from Amazon or similar sources. Please check out Vulkan Gpuinfo.org for the supported feature list of this GPU with Android 9.0.
At the moment only the first two unit tests are running but we will extend the support to as many as we can in an upcoming release. We expect to run into driver bugs. We will not actively support Vulkan 1.0.

• Vulkan - mobile phone support see above
• iOS:
  • upgraded to 12.0 (16A366)
  • we extended imGUI support for iOS with touch support and virtual keyboard
• Windows - fixed resizing ... should now work again with Alt+Enter ...
• Windows DXR - The Forge was the first rendering framework to support DXR, now that there will be hardware support, we added a screenshot of one of the unit tests below. We will add support for the other Ray Tracing APIs as well. They are useful for developing Tools. For games we recommend the Hybrid Ray-Traced solutions provided below (so far only shadows).

• Upgraded the Order-Independent Transparency unit test to support Phenomenological Transparency as described in one of Morgan McGuire's papers. Here are screenshots:

Phenomenological Transparency - Refraction

Phenomenological Transparency - Diffusion

Phenomenological Transparency - Diffusion, Refraction, Shadows

• Linux - the wave intrinsics unit test now also works on Linux. We are looking into macOS / iOS next.
• Call for contributors to change IRenderer.h - as a heads-up, we will change the renderer interface to use our own way of "Render Passes and Compute Passes" similar to the Vulkan render passes. We will analyze render and compute calls and use this information to expose data to a "Render Graph" that will be implemented on a higher level. If you want to be part of the group that thinks about how we should adjust IRenderer.h for this, please send Wolfgang a note and your skype ID

Release 1.16 - September 21st, 2018 - Order-Independent Transparency Unit Test | Wave Intrinsics Unit Test | Updated Confetti Shader Translator

• There is a new unit test that evaluates various Order-Independent Transparency methods:
  • Alpha blended transparency
  • Weighted blended Order Independent Transparency (Morgan McGuire)
  • Weighted blended Order Independent Transparency by Volition (GDC 2018 Talk)
  • Adaptive Order Independent Transparency with Raster Order Views (paper by Intel, supports DirectX 11, 12 only)
    There are more details and a comparison in the documentation folder of the unit test.

PC Windows 10 DirectX 12 GeForce 950 Driver 411.63 with a resolution of 1080p in full-screen:

Linux Vulkan 1.1.82.1 GeForce 1080 Driver 390.87 with a resolution of 1080p in full-screen:

MacBook Pro (Model A1706) with a resolution of 1080p in full-screen:

iPhone 7 with a resolution of 1334x750 in full-screen:

• There is a new Wave Intrinsics Unit test. It tests the new wave intrinsic instructions and makes sure they are support on PC Windows (DirectX 12 / Vulkan) for now. We are planning to add support on other platforms. On PC with DirectX it utilizes a "preview" integration of the DirectX Shader compiler. We were running into multiple bugs with DXC and decided to only use it for the new Shader model 6 shaders. So The Forge uses DXC for shaders that request shader_target_6_0 and FXC for everything below. The shader target can be specified during load time.

PC Windows 10 DirectX 12 GeForce 950 Driver 411.63 with a resolution of 1080p in full-screen:

• PC - fixed resizing ... should now work again with Alt+Enter ...
• Vulkan
• upgraded to the latest Vulkan Memory Allocator
• Enabled subgroup extensions for Wave Intrinsics Unit Test
• macOS / iOS
  • on-going work on improving input on macOS and iOS with imGUI
  • upgraded to macOS: 10.14 (18A389), XCode: 10 (10A254a)
• imGUI: improved implementation to make it a native citizen and expose the whole functionality. for tools, now there is more flexibility to create individual UIs for all apps. Check out the new screenshot below.

imGUI support:

• Linux - upgraded AMDGPU-Pro driver to 18.30-641594
• The Confetti Shader Translator received lots of bugs fixes and upgrades over the last six weeks. Head over to the URL and check it out. We have a large backlog with bugs and therefore it is still in alpha. New Features are:
  • include file support
  • preprocessor branching
  • switch statement
  • nested array
  • texture argments for functions
  • pur buffer (Buffer) type
  • Shader Model 6.0 (Wave)
    • SampleGrad()
    • GatherRed()
    • all()
    • gatherRed()
    • f32to16()
    • f16to32()
    • NonUniformResourceIndex()
    • determinate functions
  • GLSL
    • Shader Model 6.0 functions (Subgroup)
    • #extension system (Now, only necessary extensions are written, automatically)
    • textureGather()
    • textureGrad()
  • added loading progress bar
  • and others ...
    Here is a screenshot of the latest version.
    

September 7th, 2018 - Hybrid Ray Traced Shadows | DirectX 11 fallback layer | imGUI

• This is the biggest release so far :-)
• We added a new unit test -provided by Kostas Anagnostou @KostasAAA- that shows hybrid ray traced (HRT) shadows on all supported GPUs; Windows / Linux / XBOX One / macOS and iOS. This unit test was build to show how to ray trace shadows without using a ray tracing API like DXR / RTX. It should run on all GPUs (not just NVIDIA RTX GPUs) and the expectation is that it should run comparable with a DXR / RTX based version even on a NVIDIA RTX GPU. Kostas wrote a blog post about the details at https://interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2018/09/04/hybrid-raytraced-shadows-part-2-performance-improvements/.

PC Windows 10 Vulkan 1.1.82.1 GeForce 1080 Driver 398.82 with a resolution of 2560 * 1440 in full-screen:

iMac with AMD RADEON 580 (Part No. MNED2xx/A) with resolution of 2560x1440 in full-screen:

Here is a version running on a iPhone 7 with iOS 11.4.1 (15G77) and a resolution of 1334 x 750 in full-screen:

Please note there are no platform specific optimizations for macOS or iOS in the moment. The initial version was developed on PC and then just ported to the other platforms. We might optimize for the other platforms at some point.
Kostas plans to use the San Miguel Scene for this and then also merge it with the Light and Shadow Playground, so that you can pick different shadow techniques and compare them. He wants to implement HRT Reflections next. I wrote a short blog post about the development of this unit test at https://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.com/2018/09/ray-tracing-without-ray-tracing-api.html

• Improved the 09_LightShadowPlayground by calculating the SDF shadow in a more generic way
• Based on customer request and to support Windows 7, we added a DirectX 11 fallback code path. Because this API can not support all unit tests, it is only a choice on a select few
• IRenderer Cleanup for all platforms
  • removed several descriptor related structs, which enabled us to simplify the codebase
  • add render index draw start vertex
• We replaced NuklearUI with imGui; we are going to replace QT with imGui now for our internal tools, so trying to keep this consistent
• Created a new unit test for imGui #13 - it shows the current level of integration of imGui into The Forge
  
• Linux - changed to standard linux define instead of user defined LINUX
• Vulkan
  • supports now the descriptor update template extension: VK_KHR_DESCRIPTOR_UPDATE_TEMPLATE_EXTENSION_NAME
  • added ability to specify instance layers, instance, device extensions from app code
  • upgraded to Vulkan SDK 1.1.82.0
• The Torque 3D engine will use The Forge as its rendering layer in the future

• macOS - one thing notable is that The Forge on macOS can be used with an XBOX controller with this driver: 360Controller

August 9th, 2018 - Early Alpha of the Shader Translator system | Refactored Texture / Rendertarget interface for all platforms

• After evaluating how to approach a unified shader generation system by looking at the DirectX Shader Compiler in GitHub and also implementing it into Lumberyard a whiles ago, we decided to follow a simpler approach by developing our own shader translator based on the work that was done by Thekla with the hlslparser. We are currently extending this shader translator to support a new super HLSL source language (platform specific #defines + material description) and translate that sHLSL into the most current respective shader languages of the target platforms, so that those shaders can then be compiled with the target platform compiler. There is an early alpha version available online at Confetti Shader Translator following the excellent approach of Shader Playground as a base for our online approach (Thanks for your help tgjones!).
  The main motivation to use the shader translator instead of the DirectX Shader Compiler is code maintenance. Maintaining our own code cut of the DirectX Shader Compiler would add too much overhead on the team and it would make it much harder to implement our super HLSL language. We will spend some time testing this system. As soon as it is more reliable, there will be a Visual Studio extension and an extension for XCode to translate within the IDEs in the future.
  
• IRenderer Cleanup for all platforms (more cleanups to come)
  • Remove TextureType, RenderTargetType, TextureUsage, BufferUsage, BufferFeatureFlags
  • Expand DescriptorType enum to hold all descriptor usage patterns
  • Add ability to target mip slice UAV
• macOS
  • upgraded to 10.14 Beta (18A353d)
  • XCode 10.0 beta (10L176w)
• iOS 11.4.1 (15G77)

July 13th, 2018 - Unified Input System for all Platforms | New unit Test Light and Shadow Playground

• Added a unified input system based on Gainput to all platforms (https://github.com/jkuhlmann/gainput). The new input system substantially simplified input management on the application level over all platforms. We also simplified the camera controller. Added also new VirtualJoystick class in UI.

• Added a Light and Shadow Playground unit test. There are two types of shadows supported in the moment exponential shadows and SDF shadows. There is a switch to pick one of them during run-time. In the future there will be more complex lighting and shadow setups.
  

• There is now functionality to create views per mip / per slice for textures and render target through TextureUsage and RenderTargetUsage flags (typecast cube map to 2D texture array etc.)

• UIRenderer was removed and there is now a dedicated text rendering system different from UI rendering and no UI rendering interface anymore

• cmdbindVertexBuffer, cmdBindIndexBuffer now support offsets

• cmdBindRenderTargets now takes color array, mip slices, depth array and mip slice index

• The Pixel-Projected Reflections unit test now uses bindless textures on all platforms except for iOS as its too many to bind in one go.

• iOS: all unit tests run on our iOS test device; Visibility Buffer still doesn't as described below.

• Moved the release notes from this page into the release section and added actual releases

June 22nd, 2018 - Support of Typed Buffers | New unit test Pixel-Projected Reflections | Updated Material Playground unit test

• New unit test Pixel-Projected Projections: this unit test shows reflections that are ray traced. It is an implementation of the papers Optimized pixel-projected reflections for planar reflectors and Implementation of Optimized Pixel-Projected Reflections for Planar Reflections
  Sponza was added to the Art folder for this unit test.
• Updated unit test Material Playground: started out with Materials that can be summed up in the category Metal
• Extended the GPU config system further by adding more GPUs and classifying them with also better support for the GPU Workbench
• DirectX 12 / Vulkan:
  • added support for passing offsets, sizes through arrays in DescriptorData
  • added typed buffer support
  • upgraded to the 1.1.77.0 Vulkan SDK and updated volk for this
• macOS: V-Sync is now switchable
• Added 3D ability to the text rendering library: it was used to render the labels in the Material Playground unit test
• Resolved issues (zeros issues now? ... please keep them coming!):
  • #23 Request: Support V-Sync off on Metal unit tests..
  • #56 getUSec function in WindowsBase.cpp seem buggy

June 8th, 2018 - New Material Playground | New Vulkan extensions | GPU Workbench

• Replaced the PBR unit test with a Material Playground. In the future this Material Playground will be used in the same way games develop their materials on playgrounds like this. There should be materials like eye, skin, hair, various leather / metal / cloth etc.. This is work in progress.
• Updated assimp for all platforms to 4.1
• Vulkan (Windows & Linux): added the following extensions:
  • VK_KHR_EXTERNAL_SEMAPHORE_EXTENSION_NAME
  • VK_KHR_EXTERNAL_FENCE_EXTENSION_NAME
• macOS / iOS: upgraded to latest beta for testing
• We build a GPU testing PC that can cycle through seven different GPUs; four of them also in Crossfire/SLI. At some point we will publish an article how you can create one on your own. Here is a picture:

May 25th, 2018 - Intel-GPU support on macOS / Windows | Generic GPU config system | New API switching on Windows

• Added a GPU tracking system that helps to switch on and off features and exclude certain GPUs from running The Forge. There is support on macOS and PC now, We will consider excluding machines based on performance with the GPU tracking system. The database is a simple text file that can be changed at any point in time
• PC Windows - based on user feedback, we changed the run-time switching functionality substantially from using two DLLs to being able to just be statically bound
• Intel-GPU support:
  • Intel updated their drivers for The Forge and the new driver fixed some of the issues we saw. The Vulkan run-time crashes and the DirectX 12 driver has problems with alpha testing. Please see the PC Windows requirement list below for driver version and tested hardware
  • The macOS version of The Forge supports now recent Intel-GPU based MacBook Pro machines. Please see the list of hardware we currently test on below. Fixed issue #28 "Visibility Buffer on MacBookPro13,1 not rendered correctly"

January 22nd, 2018 - First Release

Very first release.