Intel DX11 colony demo
Very cool, Intel has published two new tech-demos with binaries and source code! Both demos use Direct3D (Colony is a D3D10 app and Fireflies exploits the D3D9 API). Okay do not look at the graphics rendering, this is not Intel’s strenght… These demos are rather focused on the good use of multi-core CPUs with Intel TBB (Threading Building Blocks).
Colony – A highly parallel crowd simulation technique
Colony is a highly parallel optimized crowd simulation technique. Tens of thousands of units are simulated using a novel ray-casting technique. This is achieved by utilizing TBB to distribute our work across multiple threads and multiple frames and utilizing SIMD to ensure further instruction-level parallelism.
Download: Colony DX11 tech-demo
Intel DX11 colony demo
Fireflies – Scalable Ambient Effects
Fireflies is a tech sample demonstrating a scalable ambient effect. In this sample, the ambient effect is a swarm of fireflies that scatter and reform into a walking character. Using Intel TBB, the firefly flight trajectory calculations performed per frame are distributed across multiple threads. By changing the number of simulated fireflies programmatically the ambient effect can be scaled to better match the performance of the platform it is running on.
Download: Fireflies DX9 tech-demo
Intel DX11 colony demo
Fireflies – Scalable Ambient Effects
“The program can’t start because d3dx9d_43.dll” is missing from your computer (…)”
Looks like someone compiled the binary versions with the _debug_ libraries of D3DX
Anyway, as a workaround (besides having latest DX SDK installed) is go find D3DX9_43.dll & d3dx11_43.dll in your Windows system folders (under SysWOW64 if using x64 Windows) and copy them in the Firfelies’ executable folder, and rename them to D3DX9d_43.dll & d3dx11d_43.dll respectively.
Nice demo. Really beautiful, and it’s really neat to see 500.000 at 60fps in my machine 😉
Not the point of the demo, but I wonder how the walking fireman would look with HDR on, using a Gaussian filter with big radius.
Good morning Dark_Sylinc!
I just got word that our engineers have finished building and testing a fix to the problem you highlighted. We’ll be uploading new source code for Fireflies very soon. Thanks for bringing this to our attention and helping direct others to a good work around!
Aloha!
Mitch
The Colony demo does not run with the renaming trick! Gives an application error! :S
The firebly demo scales almost 4X going from serial to multithreaded!
FYI: I’ve added more demos to the forum post.
This demo goes from a minimum of 160 to a maximum of 400 FPS on my system (with 5000 particles):)
Obviously I created a profile for this demo to take advantage of SLI.
What I don’t understand is:
why does this demo use 20-70 % GPU in windowed mode and 70-100% in full screen mode?
I noticed many demos have this behaviour.