NVIDIA Iron Developer Conference @ CEDEC

Welcome to the Iron Developer Gourmet Academy. If memory serves us right, last year's event focused on assembly language shader development. This fall, you are invited to participate in one full day of focused cooking sessions designed to sharpen your culinary skills in the fine art of high-level shader programming.

In the "Kitchen Stadium", a hands-on lab awaits you with the chance to compete against Shader Chefs to prove who really is the best of the best. Today's theme is......... CINEMATIC RENDERING!

"Allez Cuisine!"

You are invited to attend NVIDIA's 3rd annual conference in Japan, "Iron Developer 2003," held this year on September 5^th, as a component of CEDEC 2003 at Meiji University in Tokyo. Engineers from NVIDIA’s Developer Technology Group will focus on OpenGL and DirectX programming techniques covering advanced special effects, performance optimization, workflow & pipeline integration, as well as other topical issues for today’s real-time developer:  
 

• Secrets of the NVIDIA Demos 

• Graphics Pipeline Performance and Optimization

• Phenomena Simulation: Fluids, Gases and Solids

• Integrating Shader Technology

Find out more details here. Attendance is a must for game and real-time application developers. Also, don’t miss Microsoft’s DirectX Meltdown on the prior day at CEDEC, a great opportunity for DirectX developers to learn more about DirectX 9.0 and HLSL.

Meiji Univeristy (Liberty Hall)
Tokyo, JAPAN
http://cedec.cesa.or.jp/access.html

September 4th and 5th, 2003

10:00 AM - 6:00 PM

CLICK HERE for registration information

For any further questions, please email CEDEC directly at cedecsupport@cesa.or.jp, or irondeveloper@nvidia.com

Detailed talk descriptions:

Secrets of the NVIDIA Demos  (Kevin Bjorke)
10:30 AM 9/5

The GeForce FX and the CineFX architecture aim to bring real time rendering closer to the quality of cinematic special effects. The charter of NVIDIA's in-house demo team was to demonstrate this new technology in as visual and entertaining a way as possible. The result was the GeForce FX demo suite, comprised of "Dawn", "Time Machine", "Toys" and a real-time version of Spellcraft Studio's short movie "yeah!" This session will reveal the tricks and techniques behind the demos, and how they can be used in your own game productions. Topics will include:  Procedural texturing for aging effects in "Truck," Advanced skin shading and hair rendering in "Dawn," Real-time adaptive subdivision surfaces and ambient occlusion shading in "Dancing Ogre," Practical depth of field and post processing effects in "Toys," and finally, ultra-realistic fire and flames from the latest GeForce FX demo, Vulcan.

Graphics Pipeline Performance and Optimization (Juan Guardado)
12:30 PM 9/5

Modern graphics hardware continues to get more complex, with more stages being added to an already complex rendering pipeline, along with existing stages increasing in flexibility and complexity. Getting the best performance out of this system involves identifying the bottlenecks in your application and knowing what do about them -- a difficult task.  This talk covers optimizing the performance of your application for modern GPU rendering pipelines. Specifics for optimizing each stage of the pipeline, from CPU usage to transform and lighting, through triangle rasterization, and finally framebuffer access are covered. Details covering performance of new GPU features, including the new and much more powerful fragment shading capabilities, are presented. Finally, precise performance numbers for a myriad of common cases are provided to aid tuning and trading performance vs. quality.

Phenomena Simulation: Fluids, Gases and Solids (Juan Guardado)
2:30 PM 9/5

With the high performance, programmability and floating point precision of today’s GPUs, previously infeasible phenomena such as fluids, glow, fog and translucency can be computed and displayed at highly interactive rates. This talk introduces techniques used in many contemporary games for calculating and simulating these effects on the GPU. By using procedural texture animation and texture generation, volumetric and fluid effects can be run in real-time. Later, effects such as translucency created by approximating the look of light scattering will be covered. By addressing the effects of light transport and scattering within objects, more realistic skin, marble, smoke and clouds are feasible.

Integrating Shader Technology (Kevin Bjorke)

4:30 PM 9/5

Using shader technology in your real-time application is a clear and compelling way to exert greater cinematic control over your visuals. Recently, the evolution of programmable GPUs has been coupled with the emergence of high-level shading languages, such as Cg and HLSL. Based on this new programming language, this talk covers today’s standard real-time shader format (.fx) which is supported in Artist’s tools, such as XSI, 3ds max, and Maya. Integration of shaders with the workflow, art direction and game development environment are all critical factors to this end.  Furthermore, both shader optimization and a flexible implementation are crucial. This lecture covers far more than “how shaders work” – it deals with balancing different elements of the visual experience, different technical approaches to achieving the same appearance, and how to get peak shading performance with a minimum of compromise on a wide range of game hardware.