<p>Color has been significant in visual arts for as long as the art-forms have existed. Still images and movies have long used colors and color grading effects to affect the viewer and characterize the work. In recent years attempts have been made to bring these techniques of stylizing also to interactive games. This dissertation aims to compare two different approaches of performing real-time color grading for games. Focus is put on examining the two ways from a number of different perspectives and from there draw conclusions on advantages and disadvantages of the approaches. The results show no unanimously superior approach but rather aim to break down the results in categories and attempt to explain the benefits and drawbacks in using either one of them, aiding the decision for anyone inclined to implement color grading effects in games.</p>

Color has been significant in visual arts for as long as the art-forms have existed. Still images and movies have long used colors and color grading effects to affect the viewer and characterize the work. In recent years attempts have been made to bring these techniques of stylizing also to interactive games. This dissertation aims to compare two different approaches of performing real-time color grading for games. Focus is put on examining the two ways from a number of different perspectives and from there draw conclusions on advantages and disadvantages of the approaches. The results show no unanimously superior approach but rather aim to break down the results in categories and attempt to explain the benefits and drawbacks in using either one of them, aiding the decision for anyone inclined to implement color grading effects in games.

Game developers today are putting a lot of effort into their games. Consumers are hard to please and demand a game which can provide both fun and visual quality. This is why developers aim to make the most use of what hardware resources are available to them to achieve the best possible quality of the game. It is easy to use too many performance demanding techniques in a game, making the game unplayable. The hard part is to make the game look good without decreasing the performance. This can be done by using techniques in a smart way to make the graphics as smooth and efficient as they can be without compromising the visual quality. One of these techniques is deferred rendering. The latest version of Microsoft’s graphics platform, DirectX 11, comes with several new features. One of these is the Compute shader which is a feature making it easier to execute general computation on the graphics card. Developers do not need to use DirectX 11 cards to be able to use this feature though. Microsoft has made it available on graphic cards made for DirectX 10 as well. There are however a few differences between the two versions. The focus of this report will be to investigate the possible performance differences between these versions on when using deferred rendering. An application was made supporting both shader model 4 and 5 of the compute shader, to be able to investigate this.

Målet med denna studie är att utvärdera möjligheten att göra färgkorrigering i realtid. Denna färgkorrigering ska hjälpa färgblinda att lättare urskilja mellan olika färger. Ett problem med färgkorrigering är att det kan vara för långsamt för realtid. En prototyp där existerande algoritmer har implementerats på GPU istället för CPU tas fram, detta för att testa hypotesen att färgkorrigering tar mindre prestanda ifall den implementeras på GPU. Prestandaresultaten visar att det är lämpligt att göra färgkorrigering med hjälp av shaderprogrammering på GPU istället för CPU. Ett fortsatt arbete utifrån denna studie vore att analysera hur bra olika färgkorrigeringsalgoritmer är för färgblinda personer.

When developing applications in Direct3D today, developers can choose between using the fixed function pipeline and the programmable pipeline. The programmable pipeline is more flexible than the fixed function pipeline, but what is the price for high flexibility? Is high flexibility desired at any cost? How is the choice of pipeline affecting performance? The purpose of this master thesis is to evaluate the performance of the two pipelines. This will be achieved by developing a benchmark program, which measures performance when various graphical effects are tested. The results of the evaluation will hopefully help developers to decide which pipeline to use, in terms of performance. In the end we will see that the fixed function pipeline is faster than the programmable pipeline in all our tests.

It is a great challenge to develop a computer game. Today many games are developed in large game studios where lots of skilled people are working together. Everyone has to know what the final game should look like. Game designers are responsible for how the game should feel and look like. This also means that they decide if a programmer has to develop new techniques or not. Sometimes the game designers require lots of new techniques to be developed. Such a new technique may be rendering particle systems with a lot of particles in it. This is where this report will focus. To render particle systems it is necessary to know about the limitations there are in both hardware and software. Until today particle systems have been updated and calculated using the Central Processing Unit of the computer. With Microsoft Direct3D 10 there are new ways to render particles using Geometry Shaders. Geometry Shaders runs on the graphics card. This thesis focuses on testing rendering performance between using Geometry Shaders and not using Geometry Shaders. A questionnaire was sent to Swedish game developers to get more information about relevant topics for investigation. A general answer was that Geometry Shaders always increase particle rendering performance. This thesis investigates if and when the statement is true or not. The hypothesis was obtained from the answers to the questionnaire. Two test applications were used to investigate if the hypothesis was true or false. One test application has particle calculations on the CPU of the computer. The other test application has particle calculations on the GPU of the graphics card. Six different tests were done and the Geometry Shader approach went out to be the fastest in five of the tests. Since not all tests were faster than the CPU approach the hypothesis is not always true.

Theoretical part of this project is focused on rendering of volumetric data. It compares and appraise individual methods and thus readers get a good basic knowledge of commonnest causes of problems. Texture Mapped Volume Rendering and Volume Ray-casting methods are described in detail and the latter method is used in implementation of graphic system designed in this thesis. Secondary goals of this work are usage of less powerful hardware for volume-rendering, methods of optimization and dynamic change of output quality.

This thesis deals with design and implementation of an application for medical data imaging in real-time. The first part of project is focused on methods for obtaining data in medical practice and visualization of large volume data on computer using familiar rendering approaches. Similar applications are used outside of medicine in other fields, such as chemistry to display molecular structures or microorganisms. Another part of project will focus on benefits of visualization of volumetric data using programmable hardware and new methods of parallelization of algorithms on graphics card using CUDA technology, and OpenCL. The resulting application will display the volume of medical data based on selected method accelerated by programmable shaders, and time-consuming operations will be paralleled on graphics card.

This thesis represents master's thesis focused on acceleration of Genetic algorithms using GPU. First chapter deeply analyses Genetic algorithms and corresponding topics like population, chromosome, crossover, mutation and selection. Next part of the thesis shows GPU abilities for unified computing using both DirectX/OpenGL with Cg and specialized GPGPU libraries like CUDA. The fourth chapter focuses on design of GPU implementation using CUDA, coarse-grained and fine-grained GAs are discussed, and completed by sorting and random number generation task accelerated by GPU. Next chapter covers implementation details -- migration, crossover and selection schemes mapped on CUDA software model. All GA elements and quality of GPU results are described in the last chapter.