Browsing by Author "Watson, Benjamin"

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    The Effects of Adaptive Synchronization on Performance and Experience in Gameplay
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Watson, Benjamin; Gavane, Ajinkya; Shrivastava, Rachit; Fusiello, Andrea and Bimber, Oliver
    As graphics (GPU) hardware has improved, fixed refresh rate displays became a significant throttle on graphics performance. GPU and display manufacturers therefore introduced adaptive synchronization (Async), which allows displays to adaptively synchronize to GPUs, avoiding rendering stalls and improving frame rate mean and variation. This research is a first experimental examination of the effects of Async on the experience of dedicated (but not professional) gamers. Participants played a first-person shooter (FPS) game, both with Async on and with Async off. After each game session, we assessed participant emotional state and gaming performance. We learned that at least for this popular FPS, Async can improve gaming performance, and may also benefit experience. We also found that Async has intriguing relationships to game familiarity and years of gameplay that merit additional investigation. Further research should examine these relationships, as well as Async's effects in systems with higher frame rates.
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    Improving View Independent Rendering for Multiview Effects
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Gavane, Ajinkya; Watson, Benjamin; Yang, Yin; Parakkat, Amal D.; Deng, Bailin; Noh, Seung-Tak
    This paper describes improvements to view independent rendering (VIR) that make it much more useful for multiview effects. Improved VIR's (iVIR's) soft shadows are nearly identical in quality to VIR's and produced with comparable speed (several times faster than multipass rendering), even when using a simpler bufferless implementation that does not risk overflow. iVIR's omnidirectional shadow results are still better, often nearly twice as fast as VIR's, even when bufferless. Most impressively, iVIR enables complex environment mapping in real time, producing high-quality reflections up to an order of magnitude faster than VIR, and 2-4 times faster than multipass rendering.