The Forge is a cross-platform rendering framework supporting

Windows 10/11
- with DirectX 12 / Vulkan 1.1
- with DXR / RTX Ray Tracing API
- DirectX 11 fallback for older Windows platforms

Steam Deck
- with Vulkan 1.1
- with VK_KHR_ray_query Ray Tracing API

Android Pie or higher
- with Vulkan 1.1
- OpenGL ES 2.0 fallback for large scale business application frameworks

Apple
- iOS 14.1 / 17.0
- iPad OS 14.1 / 17.0
- macOS 11.0 / 14.0, with Intel and Apple silicon support

Quest 2 using Vulkan 1.1
XBOX One / XBOX One X / XBOX Series S/X *
PS4 / PS4 Pro *
PS5 *
Switch using Vulkan 1.1 *

*(only available for accredited developers on request)

Particularly, the graphics layer of The Forge supports cross-platform

Descriptor management. A description is on this Wikipage
Multi-threaded and asynchronous resource loading
Shader reflection
Multi-threaded command buffer generation

The Forge is used to provide the rendering layer for custom next-gen game engines. It is also used to provide building blocks to write your own game engine. It is like a "lego" set that allows you to use pieces to build a game engine quickly. The "lego" High-Level Features supported on all platforms are at the moment:

Resource Loader capable to load textures, buffers and geometry data asynchronously
Lua Scripting System - currently used for automatic testing and in 06_Playground to load models and textures and animate the camera and in several other unit tests to cycle through the options they offer during automatic testing.
Animation System based on Ozz Animation System
Consistent Math Library based on an extended version of Vectormath with NEON intrinsics for mobile platforms. It also supports now Double precision.
Consistent Memory Managament:
- on GPU following Vulkan Memory Allocator and the D3D12 Memory Allocator
- on CPU Fluid Studios Memory Manager
Input system with Gestures for Touch devices based on an extended version of gainput
Fast Entity Component System based on flecs
Cross-platform FileSystem C API, supporting disk-based files, memory streams, and files in zip archives
UI system based on Dear imGui extended for touch input devices
Shader Translator using a superset of HLSL as the shader language, called The Forge Shading Language. There is a Wiki page on The Forge Shading Language
Various implementations of high-end Graphics Effects as shown in the unit tests below

Please find a link and credits for all open-source packages used at the end of this readme.

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The Forge Interactive Inc. is a Khronos member

News

Release 1.58 - June 17th, 2024 Behemoth | Compute-Driven Mega Particle System | Triangle Visibility Buffer 2.0 |

Announce trailer for Behemoth

We helped Skydance Interactive to optimize Behemoth last year. Click on the image below to see the announce trailer:

Compute-Based Mega Particle System

This unit test was based on some of our research into software rasterization and GPU-driven rendering. A particle system completely running in very few compute shaders with one large buffer holding most of the data. Like with all things GPU-Driven, the trick is to execute one compute shader once on one buffer to reduce read / write memory bandwidth. Although this is not new wisdom, you will be surprised how many particle systems get this still wrong ... having compute shaders for each stage of the particle life time or even worse doing most of the particle work on the CPU. This particle system was demoed last year in a few talks in September on a Samsung S22. Here are the slides:

http://www.conffx.com/WolfgangEngelParticleSystem.pptx

It is meant to be used to implement next-gen Mega Particle systems in which we simulate always 100000th or millions of particles at once instead of the few dozen ones contemporary systems simulate.

Android Samsung S22 1170x540 resolution

This screenshot shows 4 million firefly-like particles, with 10000 lights attached to them and a shadow for the directional light. Those numbers were thought to be not possible on mobile phones before. Mega Particle System Android Samsung S22

Android Samsung S23 1170x540 resolution

Same setting as above but this time also with 8 Shadows from Point Lights additionally. Mega Particle System Android Samsung S23

Android Samsung S24 1170x540 resolution

Same setting as above but this time also with 8 Shadows from Point Lights additionally. Mega Particle System Android Samsung S24

PS5 running at 4K

Mega Particle System PS5

Windows with AMD RX 6400 at 1080p

Mega Particle System PC Windows

Triangle Visibility Buffer 2.0

we have the new compute based TVB 2.0 approach now running on all platforms (on Android only S22). You can download slides from the I3D talk from

http://www.conffx.com/I3D-VisibilityBuffer2.pptx

Release 1.57 - May 8th, 2024 Visibility Buffer 2.0 Prototype | Visibility Buffer 1.0 One Draw call

Visibility Buffer Research - I3D talk

We are giving a talk about our latest Visibility Buffer research on I3D. Here is a short primer what it is about:

The original idea of the Triangle Visibility Buffer is based on an article by [[burns2013]. [schied15] and [schied16] extended what was described in the original article. Christoph Schied implemented a modern version with an early version of OpenGL (supporting MultiDrawIndirect) into The Forge rendering framework in September 2015. We ported this code to all platforms and simplified and extended it in the following years by adding a triangle filtering stage following [chajdas] and [wihlidal17] and a new way of shading. Our on-going improvements simplified the approach incrementally and the architecture started to resemble what was described in the original article by [burns2013] again, leveraging the modern tools of the newer graphics APIs. In contrast to [burns2013], the actual storage of triangles in our implementation of a Visibility Buffer happens due to the triangle removal and draw compaction step with an optimal “massaged” data set. By having removed overdraw in the Visibility Buffer and Depth Buffer, we run a shading approach that shades everything with one regular draw call. We called the shading stage Forward++ due to its resemblance to forward shading and its usage of a tiled light list for applying many lights. It was a step up from Forward+ that requires numerous draw calls. We described all this in several talks at game industry conferences, for example on GDCE 2016 [engel16] and during XFest 2018, showing considerable performance gains due to reduced memory bandwidth compared to traditional G-buffer based rendering architectures. A blog post that was updated over the years for what we call now Triangle Visibility Buffer 1.0 (TVB 1.0) can be found here [engel18].

Over the last years we extended this original idea with a Order-Independent Transparency approach (it is more efficient to sort triangle IDs in a per-pixel linked list compared to storing layers of a G-Buffer), software VRS and then we developed a Visibility Buffer approach that doesn't require draw calls to fill the depth and Visibility Buffer and one that requires much less draw calls in parallel. This release offers -what we call- an updated Triangle Visibility Buffer 1.0 (TVB 1.0) and a prototype for the Triangle Visibility Buffer 2.0 (TVB 2.0).

The changes to TVB 1.0 are evolutionary. We used to map each mesh to an indirect draw element. This reuqired the use of DrawID to map back to the per-mesh data. When working on a game engine with a very high amount of draw calls, it imposed a limitation on the number of "draws" we could do, due to having only a limited number of bits available in the VB. Additionally, instancing was implemented using a separate instanced draw for each instanced mesh. We refactored the data flow between the draws and the shade pass. There is now no reliance on DrawID and instances are handled transparently using the same unified draw. This both simplifies the flow of data and allows us to draw more "instanced" meshes. Apart from being able to use a very high-number of draw calls, the performance didn't change.

The new TVB 2.0 approach is revolutionary in a sense that it doesn't use draw calls anymore to fill the depth and visibility buffer. There are two compute shader invocations that filter triangles and eventually fill the depth and visibility buffer. Not using draw calls anymore, makes the whole code base more consistent and less convoluted -compared to TVB 1.0-.

You can find now the new Visibilty Buffer 2 approach in

The-Forge\Examples_3\Visibility_Buffer2

This is still in an early stage of development. We only support a limited number of platforms: Windows D3D12, PS4/5, XBOX, and macOS / iOS.

Sanitized initRenderer

we cleaned up the whole initRenderer code. Merged GPUConfig into GraphicsConfig and unified naming.

Metal run-time improvements

We improved the Metal Validation Support.

Art

Everything related to Art assets is now in the Art folder.

Bug fixes

Lots of fixes.

References: [burns2013] Christopher A. Burns, Warren A. Hunt, "The Visibility Buffer: A Cache-Friendly Approach to Deferred Shading", 2013, Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT) 2:2, Pages 55 - 69.

[schied2015] Christoph Schied, Carsten Dachsbacher, "Deferred Attribute Interpolation for Memory-Efficient Deferred Shading" , Kit Publication Website: http://cg.ivd.kit.edu/publications/2015/dais/DAIS.pdf

[schied16] Christoph Schied, Carsten Dachsbacher, "Deferred Attribute Interpolation Shading", 2016, GPU Pro 7, Pages

[chajdas] Matthaeus Chajdas, GeometryFX, 2016, AMD Developer Website http://gpuopen.com/gaming-product/geometryfx/

[wihlidal17] Graham Wihlidal, "Optimizing the Graphics Pipeline with Compute", 2017, GPU Zen 1, Pages 277--320

[engel16] Wolfgang Engel, "4K Rendering Breakthrough: The Filtered and Culled Visibility Buffer", 2016, GDC Vault: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023792/4K-Rendering-Breakthrough-The-Filtered

[engel18] Wolfgang Engel, "Triangle Visibility Buffer", 2018, Wolfgang Engel's Diary of a Graphics Programmer Blog http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.com/2018/03/triangle-visibility-buffer.html

Release 1.56 - April 4th, 2024 I3D | Warzone Mobile | Visibility Buffer | Aura on macOS | Ephemeris on Switch | GPU breadcrumbs | Swappy in Android | Screen-space Shadows | Metal Debug Markers improved

I3D

We are sponsoring I3D again. Come by and say hi! We also will be giving a talk on the new development around Triangle Visibility Buffer.

Warzone Mobile launched

We work on Warzone Mobile since August 2020. The game launched on March 21, 2024.

Warzone Mobile

Visibility Buffer

We removed CPU cluster culling and simplified the animation data usage. Now traingle filtering only takes one dispatch each frame again.

Swappy frame pacer is now vailable in Android/Vulkan

We integrated the Swappy frame pacer into the Android / Vulkan eco system.

GPUCfg system improved with more ids and less string compares

we did another pass on the GPUCfg system and now we can generate the vendor Ids and model Ids with a python script to keep the *_gpu.data list easily up to date for each platform. We removed most of the name comparisons and replaced them with the id comparisons which should speed up parsing time and is more specific.

Screen-Space Shadows in UT9

We added to the number of shadow approaches in that unit test screen-space shadows. These are complementary to regular shadow mapping and add more detail. We also fixed a number of inconsistencies with the other shadow map approaches.

PS5 - Screen-Space Shadows on Screen-Space Shadows PS5

PS5 - Screen-Space Shadows off Screen-Space Shadows PS5

Nintendo Switch Screen-Space Shadows Switch

PS4 Screen-Space Shadows PS4

GPU breadcrumbs on all platforms

Now you can have GPU crash reports on all platforms. We skipped OpenGL ES and DX11 so ...

A simple example of a crash report is this:

2024-04-04 23:44:08 [MainThread ] 09a_HybridRaytracing.cp:1685 ERR| [Breadcrumb] Simulating a GPU crash situation (RAYTRACE SHADOWS)... 2024-04-04 23:44:10 [MainThread ] 09a_HybridRaytracing.cp:2428 INFO| Last rendering step (approx): Raytrace Shadows, crashed frame: 2

We will extend the reporting a bit more over time.