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    The Road to Vulkan: Teaching Modern Low-Level APIs in Introductory Graphics Courses
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Unterguggenberger, Johannes; Kerbl, Bernhard; Wimmer, Michael; Bourdin, Jean-Jacques; Paquette, Eric
    For over two decades, the OpenGL API provided users with the means for implementing versatile, feature-rich, and portable real-time graphics applications. Consequently, it has been widely adopted by practitioners and educators alike and is deeply ingrained in many curricula that teach real-time graphics for higher education. Over the years, the architecture of graphics processing units (GPUs) incrementally diverged from OpenGL's conceptual design. The more recently introduced Vulkan API provides a more modern, fine-grained approach for interfacing with the GPU. Various properties of this API and overall trends suggest that Vulkan could soon replace OpenGL in many areas. Hence, it stands to reason that educators who have their students' best interests at heart should provide them with corresponding lecture material. However, Vulkan is notoriously verbose and rather challenging for first-time users, thus transitioning to this new API bears a considerable risk of failing to achieve expected teaching goals. In this paper, we document our experiences after teaching Vulkan in an introductory graphics course side-by-side with conventional OpenGL. A final survey enables us to draw conclusions about perceived workload, difficulty, and students' acceptance of either approach and identify suitable conditions and recommendations for teaching Vulkan to undergraduate students.
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    An Improved Triangle Encoding Scheme for Cached Tessellation
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Kerbl, Bernhard; Horváth, Linus; Cornel, Daniel; Wimmer, Michael; Pelechano, Nuria; Vanderhaeghe, David
    With the recent advances in real-time rendering that were achieved by embracing software rasterization, the interest in alternative solutions for other fixed-function pipeline stages rises. In this paper, we revisit a recently presented software approach for cached tessellation, which compactly encodes and stores triangles in GPU memory. While the proposed technique is both efficient and versatile, we show that the original encoding is suboptimal and provide an alternative scheme that acts as a drop-in replacement. As shown in our evaluation, the proposed modifications can yield performance gains of 40% and more.
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    EUROGRAPHICS 2021: Short Papers Frontmatter
    (Eurographics Association, 2021) Theisel, Holger; Wimmer, Michael; Theisel, Holger and Wimmer, Michael
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    SIG-based Curve Reconstruction
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Marin, Diana; Ohrhallinger, Stefan; Wimmer, Michael; Sauvage, Basile; Hasic-Telalovic, Jasminka
    We introduce a new method to compute the shape of an unstructured set of two-dimensional points. The algorithm exploits the to-date rarely used proximity-based graph called spheres-of-influence graph (SIG). We filter edges from the Delaunay triangulation belonging to the SIG as an initial graph and apply some additional processing plus elements from the Connect2D algorithm. This combination already shows improvements in curve reconstruction, yielding the best reconstruction accuracy compared to state-of-the-art algorithms from a recent comprehensive benchmark, and offers potential of further improvements.