GDC 2013
We want to thank every one of you that came to GDC 2013 and visited us! Below are the presentations that were made during our sponsored sessions, as well as links (where possible) to recorded presentations.
Be sure to follow our @nvidiadeveloper twitter feed for real-time updates on everything that's important our developer community!
Note: Because the GTC and GDC conferences were back-to-back and sometimes contained overlapping talks, we have consolidated both sets of presentations. Game-related GTC-only presentations can be found here.
Eliminating Texture Waste: Borderless Realtime Ptex | John McDonald, Sr. Software Engineer, NVIDIA |
In this session, John McDonald will demonstrate a new, border-free technique for rendering Ptex datasets in real-time, on any OpenGL 4 (or Direct3D 11) capable consumer hardware. By jettisoning borders, the memory overhead of this method has even dropped below those of standard texture mapping. Session attendees will see a live Ptex demo running on commonly available consumer hardware. They will dive with John, deep into the guts of a complete, working OpenGL implementation. |
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Particle Shadows & Cache-Efficient Post-Processing | Louis Bavoil, Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA Jon Jansen, Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA |
Louis Bavoil is a developer technology engineer at NVIDIA, where he works with game developers to improve the performance and visual quality of their games using the latest GPUs. Louis has a M.S. in Computer Science from University of Utah, and a M.S. in Telecommunications from a French engineering school (ENSEIRB). He is a co-inventor of the HBAO algorithm used in the games Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3, and Batman: Arkham City. |
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D3D11 Deferred Contexts: Primer & Best Practices | Bryan Dudash, Senior Software Engineer, NVIDIA |
Bryan Dudash offers this thorough discussion about D3D11 Deferred Contexts: What they are, what kind of bottlenecks they address, and suggests best practices for using them. |
NVIDIA® Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition 3.0 - Catzilla Engine Development in DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.2 | Jeffrey Kiel, Director, Graphics Developer Tools, NVIDIA Michal Szymczyk, Chief Technology Officer, Plastic Michal Staniszewski, Creative Director, Plastic |
The new Catzilla benchmark from Plastic is showcasing the latest rendering technology of their new engine. This rendering engine supports all the latest techniques, like physically correct lighting, depth-of-field, fur, volumetric and raymarching based effects, motion blur, and many other great-looking rendering effects. Using a pre-release of Nsight 3.0, the team was able to fix 3D API and rendering bugs, and optimize their engine to squeeze every possible cycle out of the GPU and system as a whole. Along with Jeff Kiel from the NVIDIA graphics developer tools team, they'll share their stories from the trenches to give the audience a good sense of how to take advantage of Nsight 3.0 for DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.2 multi 3D API development. |
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Post Mortem: GPU Accelerated Effects in Borderlands 2 | Dane Johnston, Technical Artist, NVIDIA James Sanders, Director of Visual FX, Gearbox |
Borderlands 2 released to critical acclaim on September 18th, 2012 and showcased a wide variety of NVIDIA CUDA®-accelerated GPU effects. This session will dive into the exact effects that were featured and their benefits to the visual fidelity of the gamer experience. Side-by-side examples of how GPU-accelerated effects are changing the gaming landscape will be demonstrated in a gaming session. Further examinations into the production process and effects creation will also be explored. | |
Porting Source to Linux: Valve's Lessons Learned | John McDonald, Sr. Software Engineer, NVIDIA Rich Geldreich, Software Engineer, Valve Software Sam Lantinga, Software Engineer, Valve Software |
In this session, Rich Geldreich from Valve Software and John McDonald from NVIDIA will give an in-depth guide to porting games to Linux. A primarily technical discussion, Rich and John will discuss tool alternatives on Linux, OS issues and pitfalls, and porting from Direct3D to OpenGL. |
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Enhancing Hawken and PlanetSide 2 Through Turbulence and Destruction | Dane Johnston, Technical Artist, NVIDIA Aron Zoellner, Technical Artist, NVIDIA |
APEX Turbulence and Destruction allow the creation of a more immersive game environment than was possible in previous-generation games. In section 1, we'll illustrate the workflow and design considerations for the various APEX Turbulence examples in games such as Hawken and PlanetSide 2. APEX Turbulence simulates a massive number of particles combined with the fluid motion of velocity fields to create immersive, next-gen effects. In section 2, we'll show how a destructible environment can significantly enhance the gaming experience by creating an ever-changing battlefield. We'll cover how the destruction effects are created and how they can be scaled based on the computing platform. In addition, we'll discuss what to consider when using destruction in a networked game. Finally we'll provide a quick overview of the other APEX modules and tools which can be used to create a richer and more interactive game experience. | |
NVIDIA® Project SHIELD and Tegra® 4: Redefining AFK | Andrew Edelsten, NVIDIA Paul Hodgson, NVIDIA |
NVIDIA's recently announced Project SHIELD has been the talk of gamers worldwide. Powered by the latest NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor, Project SHIELD provides gamers with the ultimate mobile gaming experience and promises to redefine what AFK really means. Come get the inside word on how to push the limits of mobile gaming and take advantage of everything that Project SHIELD and Tegra 4 have to offer. At the session, learn hot tips and tricks when targeting Project SHIELD, get a run down of the latest NVIDIA development tools, and take an in-depth look at Tegra 4's new GPU features. |
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Moving Games into the Cloud, Technologies and Architectures | Franck Diard, NVIDIA Brent Oster, Senior Software Engineer, NVIDIA |
This session presents the technologies behind NVIDIA GRID™ and the future of game engines running in the cloud. In the first part, we'll present how you can develop cloud products using the GRID SDK. The audience will learn about the key components of NVIDIA GRID - like optimal capture, efficient compression, fast streaming, and low latency - that make cloud gaming possible. Franck will demonstrate how these components fit together, how to use the GRID APIs, and how to optimize their usage to deliver an ultimate cloud gaming experience. In the second part, Brent will present the future of game engines running in the cloud. |
GPU Rigid Body Dynamics | Richard Tonge ( Principal Engineer, NVIDIA ) |
The algorithms and implementation of the NVIDIA PhysX GPU Rigid Body simulator will be presented. Rigid body dynamics is widely used in applications ranging from movies to engineering to video games. Some of the most visually interesting simulations involve destruction, such as projectile impacts and explosions, and these can generate large piles of debris. Piles require stable simulation of static friction and resting contact, which presents many challenges. In real time simulations, such as video games, the computation budget can be small compared to the number of rigid body contacts. In these cases we must use iterative methods, terminating the iteration before convergence. By stopping early we introduce residual energy into the system, which can cause objects near rest to jitter. Parallelism is essential for good GPU performance, and we describe our algorithm which eliminates jitter at low iteration counts and maximizes parallelism. |
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OpenGL 4.x and Beyond | Evan Hart ( Software Engineer, NVIDIA ) |
OpenGL has changed rapidly with five releases in less than three years. This talk will discuss how the new improvements such as debug support, tessellation, and enhanced object-oriented support can improve your application. Additionally, this talk will cover what NVIDIA's latest features of path rendering and bindless graphics can provide. |
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Programming Project Shield and Tegra 4 | Andrew Edelsten ( Manager, Tegra Devtech, NVIDIA ) Richard Seis ( Senior Devtech Engineer, NVIDIA ) |
The NVIDIA Tegra processor has been at the cutting edge of mobile processor technology since its inception. During this session discover the new CPU, GPU, and multimedia features the Tegra 4 offers and learn how NVIDIA provides technical support for the development of cutting edge mobile application and games. The speakers will also introduce Project SHIELD, NVIDIA's new open gaming device. Project SHIELD integrates Tegra 4 into a highly innovative mobile game controller design to bring Android and PC games to the big screen. Learn some background about Project SHEILD's creation, its unique Android customizations, and the hot tips and tricks when targeting Project SHIELD with your games. |
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nvFX: A New Shader-Effect Framework for OpenGL, DirectX and Even Compute | Tristan Lorach ( Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA ) |
This talk introduces a new approach for compositing shaders and compute kernels together, using an API-agnostic description of effects for objects materials and scene management (post-processing, management of rendering passes). This approach builds on the original concepts of NVIDIA CgFX and expands it to new levels of flexibility and extensibility. Rather than creating a new shading language, we show how to supersede existing ones (GLSL, HLSL) to avoid complex parsing and yet deploy the effect in a variety of environments. Because nvFX will be open-sourced, developers will benefit from the engineering approach presented and can leverage its runtime or extend it to service other specific custom requirements. |
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Performance and Debugging Tools for High-performance Android Applications | Stephen Jones ( Product Line Manager, NVIDIA ) |
This talk introduces a new approach for compositing shaders and compute kernels together, using an API-agnostic description of effects for objects materials and scene management (post-processing, management of rendering passes). This approach builds on the original concepts of NVIDIA CgFX and expands it to new levels of flexibility and extensibility. Rather than creating a new shading language, we show how to supersede existing ones (GLSL, HLSL) to avoid complex parsing and yet deploy the effect in a variety of environments. Because nvFX will be open-sourced, developers will benefit from the engineering approach presented and can leverage its runtime or extend it to service other specific custom requirements. |
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Optimizing Tegra Apps and Games Using Unity | Paul Hodgson ( Manager, Tegra Developer Technologies, NVIDIA ) |
NVIDIA's Developer Technologies team assists software developers ship games and applications to market quicker, with better performance and with optimized user experiences. As releases approache, NVIDIA sees many developers hit similar problems. Attend the session to learn common 3D game performance issues games and how to arrive at an optimal solution in the Unity 3D engine. |