The included demo applications highlight features of ATI SmartShader?
technology. The following demos were originally written for DirectX 9
and the Windows operating system and have now been ported to the
OpenGL ARB_fragment_program extension and Mac OS X.

SmartShader? 2.1 is the second generation of cinematic shader
technology from ATI, allowing users to experience complex, movie-
quality effects in next-generation 3D games and applications. Key
features include:
? Full support for programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
? 2.0 Vertex Shaders support vertex programs up to 65,280 instructions
with flow control (loops, branches & subroutines)
? 2.0 Pixel Shaders support up to 16 textures per rendering pass with
gamma correction
? New F-buffer technology supports fragment shader programs of
unlimited length
? High dimension floating point textures
? 128-bit, 64-bit & 32-bit per pixel floating point color formats
? Multiple render targets
? Shadow volume rendering acceleration
? Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL� via extensions

Vertex and Pixel shaders are part of the paradigm shift in graphics
technology which allow developers to have unprecedented control of how
every pixel on the screen looks. Instead of being limited to the fixed
functionality of the hardware, developers can now send small programs
to the VPU which completely alter its behavior. With this flexibility,
shader capable hardware can provide effects which were either too
computationally expensive or impossible to previously perform in real
time. The Radeon� X800, 9800, 9700 and 9600 allow the developer to
expose dramatic lighting effects, soft shadows, realistic cloth
movement, reflective/refractive water with waves, and dynamic
environmental effects such as waving grass or even the movement of
leaves in a tree. These are just a small subset of what is now
possible using the newest ATI SmartShader technology. As developers
start taking advantage of shaders, you'll see computer generated
imagery rise to the next level of realism.

SmartShader HD Demos (ATI X800 Demos):

? The Double Cross:
This demo highlights the abilities of the Radeon X800 to render a
cinematic scene with realistic characters.
Through the use of motion captured animation, depth-of-field effects,
image based lighting techniques and dynamic shadows, "Ruby: The
DoubleCross" borrows heavily from both gaming and movie genres to
create a compelling demo that further raises the expectations for
real-time graphics.

Depth-of-Field
Depth-of-field is a fundamental aspect of photo realistic rendering.
Computer Graphics traditionally uses the pinhole camera model which
results in perfectly sharp images. However, real cameras use lenses
with variable aperture sizes. This causes out-of-focus objects to
appear blurry.

In the Ruby demo, this effect is generated by composing an in-focus
(sharp) image and out-of-focus (blurred) image. The normalized camera
depth for each pixel is computed and used to influence the composition
of the final image.

Hair Rendering
Realistic hair is a key part of creating believable characters. Our
approach makes use of the Kajiya-Kay shader model and generates two
highlights: specular (shifted towards hair tip) and colored (shifted
towards hair root). A sparkle is added to the secondary highlight.
Several layers of polygon patches are used to approximate the
volumetric qualities of hair, and ambient occlusion is used for self
shadowing.

Skin rendering
Skin Rendering is a difficult problem in computer graphics. Most
lighting comes from sub-surface scattering within the skin, pigment
color comes mainly from the epidermis layer, and the pink/red color is
from blood in the dermis.

Texture Space Lighting is the technique used to render realistic skin
in the Ruby demo. Diffuse lighting is rendered into an off-screen
texture using texture coordinates as the position. A blur filter is
then applied to simulate the subsurface scattering effect. A bump map
is used when adding the specular lighting in a subsequent pass. For
added realism, the specular highlight is darkened in shadowed areas.

Rendering a Diamond
Diamonds in the real-world have complex lighting including reflection,
refraction, color shifts, and bright highlights (sparkles).
Calculating multiple refractions and reflections is not trivial as it
requires performing ray-tracing (this is not feasible on current
hardware in real-time). To solve this problem, the Ruby demo uses a
fast solution that renders the back face refractions first, and then
additively blends on the front face refractions and reflections from
an environment cube. Sparkles are added at key points on the gem based
on the illumination factor at that point (based on lighting
calculations).

? Subsurface Scattering:
This demo showcases the power of the Radeon X800 and its ability to
render complex lighting interactions.
Precomputed Radiance Transfer (PRT) along with Spherical Harmonic (SH)
lighting techniques are used to model complex global illumination
including direct and indirect illumination (bounced lighting) as well
as soft shadows and subsurface scattering.

Subsurface scattering is a rendering technique where incoming light is
allowed to enter the surface of a material, the photons are scattered
by the subsurface structure of the material and then exit at various
points on the materials surface. This behavior is very recognizable in
materials such as marble and jade. These materials allow some incoming
light to pass through their surface and thus appear semi-translucent.

A realistic finite lens camera model is used to simulate depth of
field. Depth of field is a technique that allows an artist to focus
the camera on a particular point in space. Objects in front of or
behind the focal point become increasingly blurry while objects at or
near the focal point stay in focus. This technique provides important
depth and scale cues that make the scene much more compelling.

The demo contains a number of educational split screen modes.

Subsurface scattering vs. Non-subsurface scattering
This mode is used to visualize the difference between materials that
exhibit subsurface scattering and materials that do not. The statue is
split down the middle: on one side the statue is drawn using a
subsurface scattering shader, on the other side the statue is drawn
using a non-subsurface scattering shader. The statue with subsurface
scattering appears more realistic, semi-translucent and very marble-
like while the statue without subsurface scattering appears to be made
of hard plastic. Since almost all real world materials exhibit some
amount of subsurface scattering this technique is very useful when
generating photorealistic images.

Indoor/Outdoor Illumination
This split screen mode is used to visualize the complex illumination
techniques being employed by the demo. This demo uses global
illumination techniques that combine indirect outdoor illumination
with direct and indirect indoor illumination. On the left side of the
screen the set is lit using only indirect illumination from the sun.
The set elements are mostly dark but some illumination does reach
various elements of the scene by way of indirect light bounces. On the
right side of the screen the set is illuminated with light sources
inside the room. The indoor lights appear brighter because they are
more direct and don?t require multiple bounces to reach the viewers
eye. In both cases soft shadows are being cast by the various scene
elements.

? Crowd:
The rendering of large crowd sequences using Artificial Intelligence
(AI) software is a technique that has been used very effectively in a
number of recent movies and is starting to appear in games.
This demonstration shows the vertex shader processing power of the
X800 being used to render a large crowd of soldiers (1400 in total)
running across a rocky terrain. All of the models feature weighted
skinned vertices and are independently animated. The behavior of the
crowd is simulated using A.I. implant.

Additional techniques used in this demo are ambient occlusion (used
for shadowing) and glow effects using fragment shaders.

SmartShader 2.0 Demos (ATI 9800 Demos):

? Racing Car Paint:
This demo showcases the power of the Radeon� 9800 PRO and OpenGL 2.0
to implement some surface effects not possible on previous generations
of hardware.
For example, the two-tone paint shown in the demo mirrors the behavior
of real two-tone paint - and is constructed in a similar fashion. A
base layer is constructed, followed by a sparkle layer and then
finally a gloss layer.

One of the techniques shown is using a normal map to preserve
geometric detail while keeping polygon counts low. The original car
model had 34,000 polygons. The car model used in the demo uses 2,500
with a high-resolution normal map to preserve the lighting details.
Additionally, this demo showcases the high precision normal maps,
possible on the Radeon 9800 PRO. This allows for smoothness across the
surface without banding artifacts caused by lower precision.

The demo contains a number of educational split screen modes.

Normal Map on vs. Normal Map off
This mode visually shows the effect of the normal map. The left hand
side shows what the scene would look like without any normal map and
shows what the underlying low-resolution models looks like. As you can
see a majority of the lighting detail on the car is stored within the
normal map, especially in the hood and tire areas. This technique can
give better performance by reducing the size and complexity of the
models but keeping the lighting details that make it visually
appealing.

8-bit Normal Map vs. 16-bit Normal Map
This shows the advantage of having the higher precision of the 9800.
You can see the banding artifacts that occur in places where the
normal is slowly changing (like the slow curve on the hood) due to
having to quantize these similar normals into only 8bits. With the
higher precision texture these artifacts are eliminated.

Paint Buildup
This mode shows the different parts of the shader used to create the
paint effect. The top left image shows the two-tone image, where the
paint gradually changes from looking orange/red to looking yellow. The
top right view shows the sparkles layer which simulates the metal
flakes in real paint. The bottom left image shows just the gloss
layer. Finally the pieces are put together in the bottom right image
showing how they are all combined to give the final look of two-tone
car paint.

Multiple Color Schemes
The final screen demonstrates two important things. First it
demonstrates that performance isn't limited to just drawing a single
car. In fact on this screen the car is drawn eight times: twice for
each view, once for the actual car and once for the reflection of the
car. In fact since most of the drawing complexity occurs at the pixel
shader level, the performance of the shader is tied to how many pixels
on the screen use that shader. Secondly it shows the flexible nature
of vertex and pixel shaders. Since the colors of the car are simply
variables given to the shader it is easy to customize the look without
having to change any shader code. This is demonstrated by the
different paint jobs applied in each view window all using the same
vertex and pixel shader code.

? Animusic's Pipe Dream:
Pipe Dream, created by Animusic, was first shown as a non-real-time
animation in the Electronic Theatre at Siggraph 2001. With this
demonstration we show the raw horsepower of Radeon 9800, showing that
last year's offline renderer is this year's real-time demo. The scene
consists of over half a million polygons lit using per-pixel lighting
techniques; use the W key to check out the wire-frame of the demo to
show the scene complexity. Phong shading is used globally to give nice
smooth lighting and highlights. Along with the lighting, shadows are
another important feature of the demo. Take particular note of the
dynamic shadows cast by the balls. Also take note of the environment
mapping used for the balls, cymbals, and other metal to give a nice
shiny appearance. The other important feature used by this demo is
Full Scene Anti-Aliasing, which softens the "jaggies" from all the
harsh lines in the scene.
Other interesting shader effects used within the demo include:

Motion blur on the balls
One particularly interesting effect is the motion blur on the balls,
which is achieved using a combination of vertex and pixel shaders. The
first step, which occurs in the vertex shader, is to elongate the ball
in the direction of motion. The second step is to blend this elongated
ball with the background based on the intensity of the lighting, so
that darker areas appear less solid than lighter areas. This
combination of vertex and pixel shaders gives the impression of motion
blurring.

Vibrating strings
A similar technique is used for the vibrating strings. The vertex
shader is used to pull apart the string using animation data and a
pixel shader is used to generate blending values. These two working
together give the impression of string vibration.

Glow on the bars
For the glow around the bars a vertex shader is used to generate
successive layers of glow. Each blended with the previous version.

? Bear:
This demo was created to showcase the application of real-time fur.
The original model was taken from a non-real-time short by Axis
Animation and converted into a real-time demonstration. The furry
parts of the bear are composed of roughly 5,500 polygons, which are
rendered eight times at different heights from the original model to
simulate the volumetric nature of fur. The eyes, teeth, tongue and
shadow geometry consist of another 6,000 polygons.
The education modes show how the fur and lighting are constructed.

Fur Construction
This mode shows the various parts that make up the final visual for
the fur rendering. The top left view shows the base layer of the fur.
This layer is drawn first and it's the color that will show up if no
fur is showing. The top right image shows the effect of the "shells"
which are composed as layers of shell textures that simulate fur
through a pseudo volumetric rendering technique. Each shell is
generated by feeding the base layer geometry to a vertex shader with
an offset (height from the base layer), the vertex shader is then used
to distort the geometry outward and the shell texture is applied and
blended to achieve the volumetric look of fur. The bottom left view
shows a technique to further enhance the visual appearance of the
silhouette of the fur by generating fins. These fins are placed at the
polygon edges and have a texture simulating the fur along the
silhouette. The bottom right image shows all of these passes together
giving the final fur look.

Lighting Construction
This split screen shows the breakdown of the fur anisotropic lighting
into its component ambient, diffuse and specular terms. With the top
portion of the screen showing the ambient and diffuse terms, which
give the base color, the bottom left showing the specular term, which
gives the highlights, and the bottom right showing all the terms
combined for the final lighting.

Variations of Fur
This mode shows the power of shader technology; by using parameters
into shader code different looks can be achieved by just changing
these parameters. In this case the different fur lengths are changed
giving the look of shorter or longer fur.

? Chimp:
Where the original Bear demo allowed the demonstration of real-time
fur on a realistic character, with the introduction of the Radeon
9800, this technology was taken further by rendering more complex fur
characters and placing them in a detailed environment.
All of the objects that make up this scene are rendered using the
programmable shaders of the Radeon 9800 series. Highlights include:

Realistic Fur on the chimp and butterfly
Rendering realistic fur requires the model to be rendered multiple
times in layers to generate the fur effect. Each layer represents a 3D
slice through the fur. In addition, fin geometry is added to provide
realistic fur on the object silhouettes.

In this demo, the chimp is a 20,000-polygon model and the fur elements
are rendered in 8 layers. This results in over 46,000 polygons being
rendered every frame just to draw the chimp.

In addition, the lighting and rendering calculations for the fur are
performed on a per pixel basis using the programmable pixel shaders.

Rippling Water - with both reflection and refraction
In order to provide realistic water, the scene is rendered twice, once
for the main render and once again for the reflection. A programmable
vertex shader provides the ripple effect on the water.

Additionally, the differences in how red, green, and blue light
refract through water are simulated. Taking a closer look at the
water, shows a very subtle rainbow effect that provides more realism.

Moving shadows of the jungle foliage - projected onto the ground
Simulating the leafy canopy of the jungle requires realistic shadows
to be cast by the leaves on all objects in the scene. Since the leaves
will typically be blowing in the wind, it is not sufficient to bake
these shadows into the scene geometry.

The appearance of realistic shadows is created by projecting a leaf
shadow texture onto the scene - and by using a vertex shader to
randomly move these shadows around - simulating the effect of leaves
blowing in the wind. The shaders used here calculate 4 sine waves per
vertex to perform this calculation.

Iridescent lighting on the wings of the butterflies
Iridescent lighting was something implemented in subtle places in
earlier product demos. The extra capabilities of the latest shader
generation now allow the combination of iridescence with gloss maps,
transparency maps, and bump maps.

? Rendering with Natural Light:
The scene in this demo is a real-time implementation of Paul Debevec's
1998 Siggraph paper "Rendering with Natural Light." The original
version of this was rendered offline on a UNIX rendering farm. Each
frame took around 20 minutes to render.
The demo is being rendered entirely with image-based lighting - this
is a technique for using light captured from the real world to
illuminate virtual objects in a virtual scene. In this example, the
synthetic objects are illuminated with real light captured in UC
Berkeley's eucalyptus grove.

The Radeon� 9700 was the first visual processor with the high range
and precision required to implement this technique.

The educational modes in this demo showcase two of the features used
in the construction of the final scene. High Dynamic Range Textures
and post process Light Glows.

High Dynamic Range OFF vs High Dynamic Range ON
This effect of high dynamic range can be clearly seen in the
reflections. Without HDR, the reflections are washed out and lacking
in detail. With HDR, the reflections are an accurate representation of
the real-world behavior.

Go into interactive mode by moving the mouse and zoom in with the left
button. Pick a ball such as the yellow or orange opaque/chrome one and
move so that it goes from the bottom left of the screen to the bottom
right. Note that on the left half of the screen the tree canopy
reflections off of the ball are totally gone. This is due to low-
dynamic range math. On the right, these details are preserved. The
vignetting (darkening toward corners) also enhances this effect.

Light Blooms ON vs Light Blooms OFF
The light blooms are achieved by post processing the rendered image
with a filter to simulate the effect of camera overexposure in
extremely bright areas of the screen.

Go into interactive mode by moving the mouse. There is no need to zoom
in much. You want to position yourself so that the brightest part of
the distant environment is behind the center ball. Move left and
right, noting how the bright background bleeds over the foreground
objects on the right half of the screen but not on the left half of
the screen.

Camera Exposures
This showcases the ability with HDR images to simulate the real-world
artifacts introduced by cameras and film. As developers aim to get
closer in image quality to the movies, the ability to perform these
effects is crucial. Think of this as simulating the camera settings
that you are using to take a picture of your virtual world. Because
all of the rendering is done in high dynamic range space, you can
tweak the camera settings to your heart's content and the image has
the precision necessary to give an accurate and beautiful rendering.

SmartShader 2.0 Screensavers:

? Mobius Screen Saver:
Conceptually interesting pixel shaders are shown in this screen saver
insipired by M. C. Escher's woodcut print titled "Moebius Strip II". A
Moebius Strip is a one sided, or single surfaced "object." It is
twisted half way around and attached to itself, such that a single
path following the surface of the strip will cover its complete area
and end back at the start. This way all ants are able to walk an
infinite linear path.

? Lava Screen Saver:
This screen saver simulates an imaginary journey through underground
lava caves and shows a real-time example of image post-processing.
These techniques are useful for a variety of solutions, from
simulations to cinematic-quality games.

? Gargoyle Screen Saver:
Incorporating the Radeon 9800 logo, this saver accurately reproduces
the brushed metal and other shaders used in the original. An animated
clock, derived from the system time, is displayed behind the gargoyle
figure. The Gargoyle Clock demonstrates interesting shading techniques
for simulating several different types of metallic surfaces using the
Radeon 9800 Pro. Like the other demos presented here, it is running in
Apple's OpenGL.

? Dogs Screen Saver:
The Dogs (Radeon 9700 Mascott) saver is similar to the Gargoyle Clock
in technological composition.

? Bacteria Screen Saver:
Inspired by a recent cover on Scientific American, this screen saver
simulates the appearance of bacteria when viewed through a microscope.
The Bacteria demo is a simulation of depth of field rendering to
provide important depth cues and more photo-realistic image synthesis.
Depth of field techniques have been used in offline rendering for
years but were previously too computationally intense to be performed
in real-time. The raw power and advanced shading capabilities of the
Radeon 9800 and OpenGL make depth of field rendering possible at
interactive frame rates.

The ATI SmartShader 2.0 Screensavers are still missing! If you got
them, please do upload them to this page!

[Wayback Machine - ATI Developer - Apple SmartShader 2.0 Demo & Screen
Savers][1]
[Wayback Machine - ATI Radeon SmartShader HD Demos for Macintosh][2]
[Wayback Machine - ATI Radeon SmartShader 2.0 Demos for Macintosh][3]
[Wayback Machine - ATI Radeon SmartShader 2.0 Screensavers for
Macintosh][4]

See also: [ATI SmartShaders Demos 1][5]

The 1st download is ATI The Double Cross Demo.
The 2nd download is ATI Subsurface Scattering Demo
The 3rd download is ATI Crowd Demo.
The 4th download is ATI Racing Car Paint Demo.
The 5th download is ATI Animusic's Pipe Dream Demo.
The 6th download is ATI Bear Demo.
The 7th download is ATI Chimp Demo.
The 8th download is ATI Rendering with Natural Light Demo.
The 9th download is ATI Mobius Screensaver.
The 10th download is ATI Lava Screensaver.
The 11th download is ATI Gargoyle Screensaver.
The 12th download is ATI Dogs Screensaver.
The 13th download is ATI Bacteria Screensaver.

Compatibility
Architecture: PPC

SmartShader 2.0 Screensavers:
PowerPC processor
Mac OS X 10.3.8 and later
512 MB memory
ATI video card with 128 MB VRAM or higher
(Radeon 9600 XT, Mobility Radeon 9700, Radeon 9800 Pro/XT, Radeon X800
XT supported)
screen resolution 1024x768 or higher

SmartShader 2.0 Demos (ATI 9800 Demos):
PowerPC processor
Mac OS X 10.3.8 and later
512 MB memory
ATI video card with 128 MB VRAM or higher
(Radeon 9600 XT, Mobility Radeon 9700, Radeon 9800 Pro/XT, Radeon X800
XT supported)
screen resolution 1024x768 or higher

SmartShader HD Demos (ATI X800 Demos):
PowerPC processor
Mac OS X 10.4.3 and later
512 MB memory
ATI video card with 256 MB VRAM or higher
(Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition 256, Radeon X850 XT Mac Edition supported)
screen resolution 1024x768 or higher

The demos will all run by default at a resolution of 1024x768.

  [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20070216211442/http://ati.amd.com/developer/demos/macss2/index.html
  [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20070212191347/http://www2.ati.com/developer/macdemos/subsurfreadme.html
  [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20070212191355/http://www2.ati.com/developer/macdemos/ati-demo-readme.html
  [4]: https://web.archive.org/web/20041026001656/http://www.ati.com/developer/demos/macss2/index.html
  [5]: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/ati-smartshaders-demos-1

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