tag: gpu

The Power of Shaders in Real-Time Graphics Programming

2012-11-05

I've been programming in OpenGL for a few months. Like a lot of programmers, I learnt the language by myself, thanks to various tutorials, books or e-books on the subject. One couldn't say there's a lack of resources on this 20-years old language since it's so widely used throughout the world. Yet, I was surprised to discover a few weeks ago that the vast majority of what I learnt has been obsolete for almost a decade. The reason is that too many textbooks and tutorials on the Internet about OpenGL refer to a deprecated way of programming and which relates to the fixed-function pipeline. The modern way of programming in OpenGL is to use the programmable pipeline through shaders. The free e-book by Jason McKesson is a very good resource for learning modern OpenGL programming using the programmable pipeline.

Introducing Galry, a high-performance interactive 2D visualization Python package

2012-10-24

I'm releasing today the code of a first experimental version of Galry, a high-performance interactive 2D visualization Python package that I'm creating as part of my current research project.

A tutorial on OpenGL/OpenCL interoperability in Python

2012-09-18

In the last two posts, I've shown how to use OpenCL for GPGPU, and OpenGL for graphics rendering, with Python. Here I'll show how both OpenCL and OpenGL can be used at the same time with Python. It's called OpenCL-OpenGL interoperability. What is it about?

2D graphics rendering tutorial with PyOpenGL

2012-09-17

UPDATE: you may be interested in the Vispy library, which provides easier and more Pythonic access to OpenGL.

OpenGL is a widely used open and cross-platform library for real-time 3D graphics, developed more than twenty years ago. It provides a low-level API that allows the developer to access the graphics hardware in an uniform way. It is the platform of choice when developing complex 2D or 3D applications that require hardware acceleration and that need to work on different platforms. It can be used in a number of languages including C/C++, C#, Java, Objective-C (used in iPhone and iPad games), Python, etc. In this article, I'll show how OpenGL can be used with Python (thanks to the PyOpenGL library) to efficiently render 2D graphics.

A PyOpenCL tutorial on Windows with or without a GPU

2012-09-16

I've been using CUDA and PyCUDA as GPGPU platforms for a few years now. They enable access to the incredible computational power of graphics cards through a simple C-like language. A recent Nvidia graphics card is nevertheless required in order to execute CUDA code. Some computers may not include a Nvidia GPU, but rather an AMD/ATI card or even an integrated graphics processor. Those computers thus cannot execute a CUDA program.