GDC 2016 - Wednesday Presentations

Allegorithmic and NVIDIA will show how combining Substance, worldwide reference for procedural textures, MDL, the new standard to define multi-layer materials, and NVIDIA Iray, GPU-accelerated unbiased raytracer, will help solving artists and developers PBR material challenges from edition to final frame rendering for artistic shots. After explaining MDL basics and the associated material workflow in Substance Designer, we will showcase the latest edition of Substance Painter, market’s most innovative real-time 3D painting software. Now embedding Iray as alternate viewport, Substance Painter fully leverages the power of MDL and Substance and natively enhances your art with the most advanced rendering quality reduced to minimal compute time thanks to GPU acceleration. Sébastien Deguy (Allegorithmic CEO) and NVIDIA will be showing with actual game artist content, how you can now iterate and render an infinite number of photo-shoot of your 3D art with one single tool.

• Manuel Kraemer (Sr. Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA)
• Sébastien Deguy (Allegorithmic CEO)

As advanced games and applications continue to push the performance envelope, developers look to their 3D APIs for improved predictability, threading and reduced CPU load. New extensions to OpenGL and a totally new 3D API Vulkan are answering these requests directly. This session introduces and details both of these approaches. The session shows how applications can use OpenGL “AZDO” (Approaching Zero Driver Overhead) extensions like NVIDIA’s Command Lists to greatly reduce single-threaded CPU overhead while reusing existing OpenGL code. Going further, the second section introduces the new 3D API from Khronos called Vulkan; focusing on how to use Vulkan’s command buffers, precompiled "SPIR-V" shaders, application-managed rendering resources and rendering queues, to take full advantage of true multi-threaded rendering. The speakers detail how to efficiently synchronize multiple threads using Vulkan at top performance. Finally, there is a discussion of the tradeoffs of extended OpenGL and AZDO versus Vulkan, and how a developer might choose between them. Throughout, examples of real applications and source code are shown.

• Mathias Schott (Sr. Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA)
• Lars Bishop (Sr. Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA)
• Christoph Kubisch (Sr. Developer Technology Engineer)

This talk focuses on some of the new features that DX12 and DX11.3 introduce, as well as touch up on how to drive DX12 efficiently. Amongst other things the slides will shed light on the use of predication, ExecuteIndirect and explicit MGPU in DX12.

• Holger Gruen (Sr. Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA)

This session will describe a new technique that interpolates between geometrically correct hard shadows and percentage closer soft shadows. Find out how the most common problems of aliasing, peter-panning, acne, and overlapping blockers are solved with this new approach. Plus, we’ll cover the practical implications of how this fits into modern game engines.

• Jon Story (Sr. Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA)

Atmospheric environments don't exist in a vacuum! This session is a deep dive into the Volumetric Lighting technology developed by NVIDIA for Fallout 4. In it we review the physical principles behind how light is affected by the media it travels through, and go into the details of our approach. Finally we wrap up with a postmortem of its integration into Fallout 4, where we discuss overall performance and explore issues that developers might want to keep in mind when designing their own rendering pipelines.

• Nathan Hoobler (Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA)

This two-part talk will cover two different Ambient Occlusion methods. The first is HBAO+ Ultra, a two-pass screen-space solution that uses a large radius AO effect for background objects and a smaller radius AO effect for the characters. The second is VXAO, or Voxel Ambient Occlusion, which produces global and view-independent AO.

• Andrei Tatarinov (Sr. Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA)
• Alexey Panteleev (Sr. Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA)