Real-Time Special Effects for Computer Games
(Tien-Tsin Wong)

Traditional graphics hardware accelerators are basically a rendering black-box. Users pass the polygons, texture, and lighting configuration to the hardware. The hardware returns an image. However, due to the black-box design, there are many restrictions in the rendering process.

Current commodity graphics hardware accelerators (e.g. nVidia GeForce FX, ATI) have built-in with a parallel shader hardware. It allows the users to develop shader programs to drive the rendering. This offers much flexibilities to game programmers and graphics researchers. In this project, we exploit the hardware capabilities, develop shaders and generate special effects in real-time. The generated images are not possible to be synthesized in real-time using pure software implementation.