Al Green
Al Green's Brother
Home -- News -- Articles -- Books -- Source Code -- Videos -- Xmas -- LinkedIn -- About

The Xmas Demo 2022

Nils Liaaen Corneliusen, Sjur Julin
2023 -- 2022 -- 2021 -- 2020 -- 2017

Click to watch video on YouTube

Introduction

The never-ending saga of recycled Xmas demos continues! We took last year's release and updated it for a newer and slightly more powerful target: The NVidia Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit [anandtech.com]. Sporting 12 ARM cores and 2048 GPU cores, it's like a PC from 2016. (Without the fast GDDR or high clock rates, but yeah, you get the point.) Compared to the Xavier from 2016, it's roughly 4 times faster. Instead of wasting that power on 4K or some other crap, we generally made everything better and faster and smoother. We also fixed a busload of bugs and quirks.

The main purpose of the Xmas Demo has always been to reproduce computationally intensive graphical effects on cheap low-end hardware. Anything is possible, as long as one is willing to take the time to understand how things work and write code in languages that execute efficiently. We find it mildly amusing that new programming languages are given names like "Python" and "Swift" when the opposite is true. Appropriate names would have been "Sloth" and "Sluggish". All this is discussed in our wildly popular book Real Programming.

The code is, obviously, written in the fastest (and greenest) programming languages ever: C and GLSL. It compiles and runs on both Linux and Windows with assorted graphics cards.

From the article C is the greenest programming language [hackaday.com]:

Have you ever wondered if there is a correlation between a computer's energy consumption and the choice of programming languages? Well, a group of Portuguese university researchers did and set out to quantify it. Their 2017 research paper entitled Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages / How Do Energy, Time, and Memory Relate? may have escaped your attention, as it did ours.

Source Code

An assortment of shaders from ShaderToy have been modified and used. Some were heavily modified, others less so. The archive contains the modified versions. Below are links to the original versions:

Artwork

Orin Sly C Max Pygo Cobra C
V73D Bike Real Programming Bugle Boy Big Bug

Snapshots

The Xmas Demo 2022 Cyberpunk City The Xmas Demo 2022 Sly The Xmas Demo 2022 Madder Bulb The Xmas Demo 2022 No Python The Xmas Demo 2022 Cobra C The Xmas Demo 2022 Robot Attack The Xmas Demo 2022 Fierier Valley The Xmas Demo 2022 Julia Quaternions Ultra HD The Xmas Demo 2022 Credits The Xmas Demo 2022 Big Bug

Article Licensing Information

This article is published under the following license: Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0)
Short summary: You may copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially. You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.


Ekte Programmering Norwegian flag
American flag Real Programming
Ignorantus AS