AMD GPU Particles Sample

The GPUParticles11 DirectX 11 sample demonstrates how to implement a simple GPU-based particle system. It also shows how to perform depth buffer collisions as well as sorting the particles on the GPU for correct blending of rasterized billboards. The sample also shows an alternative technique to rasterization that leverages DirectCompute to render the particles in tiles in a compute shader.

Prerequisites

• AMD Radeon™ GCN-based GPU (HD 7000 series or newer)
• 64-bit Windows® 7 (SP1 with the Platform Update), Windows® 8.1, or Windows® 10
• Visual Studio® 2012, Visual Studio® 2013, or Visual Studio® 2015

Getting Started

• Visual Studio solutions for VS2012, VS2013, and VS2015 can be found in the gpuparticles11\build directory.
• Additional documentation can be found in the gpuparticles11\doc directory.

Premake

The Visual Studio solutions and projects in this repo were generated with Premake. To generate the project files yourself (for another version of Visual Studio, for example), open a command prompt in the premake directory and execute the following command:

• update_vs_files_for_dx11_sample.bat gpuparticles11 [action]
• For example: update_vs_files_for_dx11_sample.bat gpuparticles11 vs2010

This version of Premake has been modified from the stock version to use the property sheet technique for the Windows SDK from this Visual C++ Team blog post. The technique was originally described for using the Windows 8.0 SDK with Visual Studio 2010, but it applies more generally to using newer versions of the Windows SDK with older versions of Visual Studio.

The default SDK for a particular version of Visual Studio (for 2012 or higher) is installed as part of Visual Studio installation. This default (Windows 8.0 SDK for Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8.1 SDK for Visual Studio 2013) will be used if newer SDKs do not exist on the user's machine. However, the projects generated with this version of Premake will use the next higher SDK (Windows 8.1 SDK for Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 10 SDK with Visual Studio 2013), if the newer SDKs exist on the user's machine.

For Visual Studio 2015, this version of Premake adds the WindowsTargetPlatformVersion element to the project file to specify which version of the Windows SDK will be used. To change WindowsTargetPlatformVersion for Visual Studio 2015, change the value for _AMD_WIN_SDK_VERSION in premake\amd_premake_util.lua and regenerate the Visual Studio files.

Third-Party Software

• DXUT is distributed under the terms of the MIT License. See dxut\MIT.txt.
• Premake is distributed under the terms of the BSD License. See premake\LICENSE.txt.

Attribution

• AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Radeon, and combinations thereof are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.
• Microsoft, DirectX, Visual Studio, and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.