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Title

The State of Computer Graphics in 2006
Author

Luc Barthelet
Organization: Wolfram Research
Department: Executive Director, Wolfram Alpha
Conference

2006 Wolfram Technology Conference
Conference location

Champaign IL
Description

Computer graphics have evolved dramatically in the last 10 years with the introduction of consumer-level hardware targeted to video game players. I will start by comparing the polygon-based rendering pipeline and the ray-tracing pipeline. I will then describe, with examples, each step of the pipeline: “tessalisation of meshes”, “vertex shaders”, “pixel shaders”, “anti-aliasing”, “reflection mapping”, “shadow buffers”, and “dynamic lighting”. This will lead to a discussion about the implication of the pipeline in terms of bandwidth, computational parallelization, and dedicated processors. The examples will be run in Mathematica using .NET/Link.
Subject

*Unclassified