Half year catchup on Graphics, GPUs, Compilers, etc.

Another slow month on the blog. More than half way through the year, so its time to catch up on the backlog of news. Only covering graphics, games, physics and GPGPU and compilers. Expect a number of posts on robotics soon!

• GitHub is now more popular than SourceForge.
  
• Fabian 'ryg' Giesen has put together an in-depth explanation of the graphics hardware pipeline.
  
• nVidia released an extension to allow OpenGL direct access to DirectX buffers. Now you can write your graphics programs in both OpenGL and DirectX - pick whichever is easiest.
  
• nVidia released their 11th Graphics SDK - DirectX 11 only.
  
• Aras did a blog post on visualising mip-map levels and released the code to his shader.
  
• Redirect OpenGL from a remote machine with this VirtualGL tutorial.
  
• Morphological Anti-Aliasing paper with source code.
  
• Tim Lottes released his FXAA anti-aliasing source code
  
• José María Méndez wrote a fantastic article on a simple method to implement screen space ambient occlusion.
  
• Improve your ambient occlusion with occlusion normals to enable dynamic shading.
  
• A simple GLSLShader handling class
  
• Dave has a post on how you can generate game characters with a webcam.
  
• Source code from the Game Development Tools book. From texture generation and CSG to Continuous Integration, Perforce and XML.
  
• Steven Wittens has a fantastic series of posts on procedurally generating planets and worlds.
  
• Amit's blog post on polygon map generation using Voroni and Delaunay is worth a read.
  
• The old gameUltima 6 technical documents have been released. An interesting look at game design and programming decisions made in 1990. This should help nuvie, which has already made great progress.
  
• Oldskool demoscener Trixter wrote an interesting post onC64 vs IBM PC, and argues the C64 was a faster computer.
  
• Democoder Ferris/YUP did an interesting post on
  creating a tiny 1k graphics demo.
  
• John Ratcliff updated his Hierarchical Approximate Convex Decomposition utility library.
  
• Tim Ventimiglia and Kevin Wayne did an interesting post onusing the Barnes-Hut algorithm to accelerate n-body simulations.
  
• Pierre Terdiman has a great post on fast separating axis tests to speed up your collision detection for convex objects.
  
• PhysBAM source code - there is plenty of great stuff in here, so I'm sure to do a whole blog post on this later. It covers maths (e.g. ODEs, fourier transforms), spatial subdivision (KD trees, octrees), collision detection, raytracing and so much more.
  
• OpenCloth is a new library for cloth simulation algorithms.
  
• nVidia APEX SDK is now free. It has a number of functions that help with clothing and destruction physics.
  
• PhysxLab is a digital content creation tool to help you take advantage of the APEX sdk destruction features.
  
• The Oren Game Engine blog has a great post onimplementing destruction fractures.
  
• A realtime raytracer with pure C++, OpenMP and CUDA written by Thanassis Tsiodras is accompanied by some interesting analysis.
  
• Microsoft Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) appears to be the microsoft attempt at competing with CUDA, OpenCL and some of the libraries ontop of those technologies.
  
• Microsoft also released concurrent containers, parallel versions of STL algorithms.
  
• WebCL - OpenCL for the web, at Nokia research.
  
• AMD's OpenCL University kit covers some OpenCL and GPU basics.
  
• AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) SDK (formerly ATI Stream) has had a few updates, currently 2.4 is out.
  
• AMD gDEBugger is now free for debugging OpenGL and OpenCL programs.
  
• Intel SPMD Program Compiler is designed to generate optimal SIMD programs from a C-like language.
  
• PathScale EKOPath 4 is an optimising compiler, now free for linux, BSD and Solaris.
  
• Yang Chen wrote an amazing post comparing compiler optimizations.
  
• Helpful hints on the unix command xargs
  
• FreeArc is an amazing open source compressor. Fast and fantastic compression ratios.
  
• Google's excellent diff/match/patch tools
  
• Visual hashing explained, how to detect similar images.
  
• Ocropus is a open source library for Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
  

Finally, here is the SIGGRAPH 2011 technical papers highlights video, it contains a number of interesting advances in physics simulations and modeling.