<\/span><\/span>Final talk was by a fellow who did super-accurate, highly realistic facial rendering with subsurface scattering.\u00a0 His technique was an improvement on the nVidia one in many ways (speed\/quality), but still not realitime.\u00a0 Still, was interesting conversation about the difficulties of rendering realistic skin.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n–\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nTuesday
\n<\/strong>Course- Beyond Programmable Shading I + II<\/p>\nAll day course that talked about the direction and emerging graphics trends.\u00a0 I alternated between this and looking at posters during the day.<\/p>\n
\n- <\/span><\/span><\/span>Raja Koduri from Apple did a great talk on how power is managed in current devices.\u00a0 He basically echoed what Intel has been saying: power isn\u2019t scaling with Moore\u2019s law \u2013 and how simple programming mistakes can save or kill a battery.\u00a0 He talked about the need for dialog between hardware and software folks to develop API\u2019s for power usage feedback and for current API\u2019s that might need to be re-worked for low-power futures.<\/li>\n
- <\/span><\/span><\/span>There was talk about allowing the actual scheduling methods used internally to graphics processors might need to be exposed in the future for greater programmability and what possibilities that might open.<\/li>\n
- <\/span><\/span>There was a talk about how nVidia Optix SIMD-izes it\u2019s ray tracing pipeline<\/li>\n
- <\/span><\/span>Decent talk on current state of the art on bokeh, motion blur and DOF effects.<\/li>\n
- <\/span><\/span>There was a good talk by Intel\u2019s Marco Salvi on their OIT methodology along with other recent efforts.<\/li>\n
- <\/span><\/span>At the end, there was a SUPER open-panel discussion with speakers about where DirectX\/OpenGL\/OpenCL were going.\u00a0 The consensus is that there is no consensus.\u00a0 Things are in a real flux right now with radically competing demands. Console devs want absolute control (open the gfx api command buffer to us!), mobile developers that want low-power\/long life, desktop devs still wanting the best quality, and the uncertainty of the \u2018platform of the future\u2019 being really unknown (will we all be on iPads\/consoles\/laptops\/etc).\u00a0 The only thing they seem to agree on is that DirectX\/OpenGL are basically still the best solutions we have unless we want to really bifurcate the API landscape \u2013 and it\u2019s unclear whether we want to do that.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of opportunity for new technologies and new movers to make a big impact.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Poster sessions was pretty good with lots of entrants.\u00a0 Nothing ground breaking, but there were several topics that I now want to look up. (don\u2019t have notes with me today).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Wednesday:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n- Spent good part of the morning wandering the show floor, checking out some of the art and book displays, and seeing the show reels in the digital theater.\u00a0 The afternoon was my turn in booth duty.<\/li>\n
- Show floor and hiring area was noticeably smaller than the California venue.\u00a0 Big things this year: 3D printers were really big with lots of people doing super-cool live demos.\u00a0 3D image capture was also big with some great facial\/body capture systems.\u00a0 Lots of 2-3 year computer art degree programs and schools were really pushing their schools.\u00a0 I worry that there is going to be a glut of artists in about 3-4 years when these masses of graduates get out.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
<\/p>\n
Thursday:<\/strong><\/p>\nA grab bag day of talks as the all-day courses were mostly over.<\/p>\n
Hiding Complexity (occlusion culling):<\/p>\n
\n- <\/span><\/span>For Allen Wake\u2019s almost all outdoor scenes, he used a method of culling shadows that looked from objects to their visible lights.\u00a0 He\u2019d then use scissor rects for each cascaded shadow layer to avoid filling pixels where they weren\u2019t needed and not even render certain cascades if they were empty.\u00a0 He also used temporal cues\/temporal bounding boxes to avoid recalculating cascades if they didn\u2019t change much<\/li>\n
- <\/span><\/span>Latest Need for Speed \u2013 the classic SIMD tale.\u00a0 They realized a 40x speedup by just throwing out their fancy data structures and simply SIMD-izing their culling system and arranging the data by the track layout.<\/li>\n
- <\/span><\/span>Killzone 3 culling \u2013 many details, but basically they use a quick sw rasterizer distributed on many PS3 SPU\u2019s to determine list of objects to draw on a 640x360p depth buffer in 16 pixel high strips.\u00a0 In the visibility step, the assume all objects visible last frame are still visible, then test individual objects against the depth buffer in parallel.\u00a0 Do simple sphere reject first, then bounding box test if sphere test passes.\u00a0 For determining good occluders automatically, they use the low-poly physics mesh of the object.\u00a0 They pick objects that have a fairly large bounding box, and who\u2019s coverage area is near it\u2019s bounding box area.\u00a0 (actual coverage area is stored in meta-data).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Smokin\u2019 Fluids:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n- <\/span><\/span><\/span>Mostly non-realtime smoke simulation talks.\u00a0 Best talk was on capturing thin features in smoke simulations. They used a moderately low voxel field with particles to simulate.\u00a0 Then they did a clever pass over the data to \u2018condition\u2019 the voxel data to maintain superb fine details.\u00a0 Turned out to be almost 10x faster than traditional method and didn\u2019t suffer from the problems of simulations looking very different at higher and higher simulation densities.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Discrete differential geometry<\/p>\n
\n- <\/span><\/span><\/span>Some pretty heady talks on discrete laplacians and circular arc structures.\u00a0 Most of it was above my head \u2013 but was an interesting talk about how they could identify whether a curvy building could be made up of manufacturable, uniform pieces (like a geodesic dome)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Filtering Techniques for AA<\/p>\n
\n- <\/span><\/span>Great talk on AA techniques which really turned into the \u2018Why you should convert your game to MLAA today\u201d cheering session.\u00a0 Presentations started with different presentations on how people implemented MLAA in God of War III, on Xbox, and on PS3 for various games.<\/li>\n
- <\/span><\/span>Good talk on FXAA and SRAA as alternatives from nVidia \u2013 but over half the room left by this point.<\/li>\n
- <\/span><\/span><\/span>One guy from nVidia got up and said if they could give you MSAA or the like for nearly free if they\u2019d convert back.\u00a0 The speaker said, \u201cNo, I\u2019d still keep MLAA on the CPU and then use the GPU for something else\u201d.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summary:\u00a0 Very good trip, but not a huge \u2018groundbreaking\u2019 year of new technologies. Courses were really good and had a lot of good information from top-notch game developers\/houses.\u00a0 Most of the courses included a review\/update on \u2018what is the current state of the art\u2019 which is good for those who aren\u2019t following those niches closely on a regular basis. Voxels and voxel methods are kind of back in rage again \u2013 but for things like visibility, ambient occlusion, and AI…<\/p>\n
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