GDC'14 Show Update

Thursday is Sponsored Session day from NVIDIA with 6 intense tech talks covering everything from mobile, though desktop to cloud rendering.

Also don't forget to stop by the booth and check out G-SYNC, GameWorks, Shield, GRID Streaming and the amazing Tegra K1. We have many engineers in the booth and they love to talk to developers so be sure to stop by.

There is also a DirectX 12 announcement from Microsoft today at 10am.

News from the Show

Epic is putting Unreal into more hands than ever

Epic Games announced today a new licensing program for Unreal Engine 4 and expanded support for Android. We think this move will revolutionize game development by making their state-of-the-art game engine accessible to a vast number of game developers.

Together with Epic, we’ve incorporated support for NVIDIA GameWorks directly into Unreal Engine 4 making it easier for UE4 licensees to take advantage of our technology. NVIDIA Gameworks libraries are designed to help developers create a wide variety of special effects, such as more realistic clothing or destruction, and now these effects are available to every developer with a UE4 license.

Crytek Adds NVIDIA GameWorks to “Warface”

We’re announcing today at the Game Developers Conference, in San Francisco, that we’ve teamed up with Crytek to add support for several NVIDIA GameWorks technologies to its hit free-to-play online first-person shooter “Warface,” powered by CRYENGINE, their award-winning game development solution.

“Warface” uses CRYENGINE’s advanced graphics and game technology to create a fast-paced, online first-person shooter, featuring intuitive controls and slick gameplay. The addition of GameWorks technologies like NVIDIA PhysX and VisualFX will take the gameplay in “Warface” to a higher plane of realism and engagement.

Titanfall to Get More Eye Candy with NVIDIA

Mixing mayhem and monstrous machines in never-before-seen ways, Titanfall has already reinvigorated the first-person shooter genre. Now, we’ll be working with Titanfall’s game developer, Respawn Entertainment, to keep their multiplayer, first-person shooter at the cutting edge of image quality.

One of the key GameWorks features that will be built into Titanfall: Temporal anti-aliasing (TXAA), a film–style anti–aliasing technique that reduces the crawling and flickering seen in motion when playing games.

We will also be working together to add Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion+ (HBAO+) technologies to create more lifelike shadows in Titanfall. HBAO+ uses advanced algorithms to create shadows that react accurately on and around objects in Titanfall in a lifelike, non-uniform fashion.

What is NVIDIA GameWorks?

NVIDIA GameWorks represents our promise to gamers and developers to make the best game experience possible. GameWorks is a collection of technologies and tools that include visual and physical simulation software, development kits, debuggers, algorithms, engines and libraries that can already be found in top-selling games.

Cloud Architectures, Onboarding, and Game Streaming with NVIDIA GRID™

10:00 am to 11:00 am
Franck Diard (Chief SW Architect, NVIDIA)
Samuel Gateau (Software Engineer, NVIDIA)
Eric Young (Manager of Content and Technology, NVIDIA)

This session presents the technologies behind NVIDIA GRID and game streaming in the cloud. In the first part, we'll cover the key components of GRID - like using the GRID API's optimal capture, efficient compression, fast streaming, and low latency to deliver an ultimate cloud gaming experience. In the second part, we'll go over optimization guidelines and available libraries that can be used for game engines running in the cloud - gamepad controller support, improved sign-on for games, adding global illumination, and PhysX. In the third part, we'll demonstrate how to use Amazon G2 servers with the NVIDIA GRID APIs to stream games on the cloud.

DirectX Advancements in the Many-Core Era: Getting the Most out of the PC Platform

11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Yury Uralsky (Director of Developer Technology, NVIDIA)
Dan Baker (Partner, Oxide Games)

See how upcoming improvements in Windows graphics APIs can be practically used by next-generation game engines to get dramatic gains in work submission efficiency and scalability across multiple CPU cores.

Approaching Zero Driver Overhead in OpenGL

1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Cass Everitt, (OpenGL Engineer, NVIDIA)
John McDonald (Senior SW Engineer, NVIDIA)
Graham Sellers (Senior Manager & Software Architect, AMD)
Tim Foley (Advanced Rendering Technology team lead, Intel)

Driver overhead has been a frustrating reality for game developers since the beginning of the PC game industry. On desktop systems, driver overhead can decrease frame rate, while on mobile devices driver overhead is more insidious-robbing both battery life and frame rate. In this unprecedented sponsored session, Graham Sellers (AMD), Tim Foley (Intel), Cass Everitt (NVIDIA) and John McDonald (NVIDIA) will present high-level concepts available in today's OpenGL implementations that radically reduce driver overhead by up to 10x or more. The techniques presented will apply to all major vendors and are suitable for use across multiple platforms. Additionally, presenters will demo practical applications of the techniques in an extensible, open source comparison framework.

Bringing Unreal Engine 4 to OpenGL: Enabling High-End Visuals from PC to Mobile

2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Evan Hart (Principal Engineer, NVIDIA)
Mathias Schott (Senior SW Engineer, NVIDIA)
Nick Penwarden (Lead Graphics Programmer, Epic Games)

This talk will focus on the path toward bringing a fully capable OpenGL renderer to Unreal Engine 4. It will cover the challenges of mapping to the API, cross-platform shader management, porting to Android, and the steps needed to get great performance. Additionally, we'll dive into the Tegra K1 processor and demonstrate how having a fully functional OpenGL path enables high-quality rendering on a handheld device powered by Tegra K1. Attendees will leave this session with an understanding of the work required to get a fully functional, high-performance OpenGL backend on a modern engine that can span mobile to high-end PCs.

Experience the magic of Respawn's Titanfall™ with the new NVIDIA Nsight 4.0

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Jeffrey Kiel (Sr. Manager Developer Tools, NVIDIA)

In this talk, Jeffrey Kiel, Sr. Manager Developer Tools, unveils the redesigned NVIDIA® Nsight™ 4.0 Direct3D 11 user experience through the lens of Respawn Studios highly anticipated game title, Titanfall. You'll see how Nsight's new GUI quickly and efficiently dissects the advanced graphics content of this game. Advanced features for compute shader profiling provide unprecedented insight into the performance characteristics of DirectCompute workloads. Improvements to Nsight's unique hardware shader debugging capabilities broaden pixel history handling of shaders compiled without symbols, and much more. Come learn what the new Direct3D 11 user experience in Nsight 4.0 can do for you and get a glimpse behind the curtain at the magic of Titanfall!

The Witcher 3: Enabling Next-Gen Effects through NVIDIA GameWorks

5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Balázs Török (Lead Engine Programmer, CD Projekt RED)
Monier Maher (Director, VisualFX, NVIDIA)
Dane Johnston (Content Manager, NVIDIA)

NVIDIA GameWorks allows the creation of a more immersive game environment than was possible in previous-generation games. In the first part of the presentation, we'll show how CD Projekt RED integrated NVIDIA HairWorks into The Witcher 3 to provide more realistic fur and hair simulation. We'll discuss how to avoid common problems when using dynamic fur and hair, and we'll also go over the artist workflow. In the second part of the presentation, we'll provide an overview of the different GameWorks components: simulating realistic waves with NVIDIA WaveWorks, cinematic smoke and fire through NVIDIA FlameWorks, realistic skin rendering with NVIDIA FaceWorks, improved shadows with NVIDIA ShadowWorks, and more.