GDC 2020 show guide from NVIDIA
Tuesday March 17th
Introduction to DirectX Ray Tracing (Click To Register)
Tuesday, March 17th | 14:00 - 17:00 | Golden Gate A Ballroom at the Marriott Marquis SF
This course provides an introduction to ray tracing and Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API. The first half of the course focuses on ray tracing basics, DXR's new ray tracing shaders, as well as some open-source shader tutorials. The second half of the course goes over the new API mechanisms of DXR, then demonstrates a simple DXR ray tracer from scratch (including source code). The course concludes with an interactive coding session, where attendees owning an RTX-capable laptop can go hands-on with DXR.
Speakers: Eric Haines, Adam Marrs
Wednesday March 18th
Witcher 3 on the Nintendo Switch: GPU & Memory Optimization
Wednesday March 18th | 10:30 - 11:15 | South Hall, Room 153
A lot of old and new games are ported to Nintendo Switch; this talk will show that Switch is a capable platform that can run even the most demanding today’s games with little loss in fidelity. We describe in detail CPU, Memory and Build size optimizations and tradeoffs we made during the development of Switch version of Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt.
Speakers: Roman Lebedev
Physics simulation in NVIDIA Omniverse
Wednesday March 18th | 11:30 - 15:15 | South Hall, Room 153
This talk will describe the USD based real time simulation and authoring capabilities in Omniverse.
Speakers: Adam Moravansky
Raytraced Shadows in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Wednesday March 18th | 12:30 - 13:30 | South Hall, Room 153
The story behind how (almost) pixel perfect shadows were introduced into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to make it even more realistic. Come to learn how RTX can be integrated into a modern, forward+ engine with minimal to no content changes, how to approach ray tracing of local area lights, and how to clean up all this noise in performant way.
Speakers: Michal Olejnik, Pawel Kozlowski
RTXGI: Scalable Ray Traced Global Illumination in Real Time
Wednesday March 18th | 14:00 - 15:00 | South Hall, Room 153
In this talk, we will discuss how you can achieve multi-bounce ray traced diffuse global illumination in real time with the new RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI) SDK. RTXGI fits into the modern game engine by directly replacing existing indirect lighting approaches such as screen-space ray casting, precomputed lightmaps, and baked irradiance probes. We combine ray tracing, fast irradiance updates, and a moment-based depth scheme for occlusion calculations to create a scalable system without bake times or light leaks. RTXGI is supported on any DXR-enabled GPU and provides developers with an ideal starting point to bring the benefits of real-time ray tracing to their existing tools, knowledge, and capabilities.
Speakers: Adam Marrs
Ray Traced Reflections in Wolfenstein: Youngblood
Wednesday March 18th | 15:30 - 16:30 | South Hall, Room 153
Engineers from NVIDIA and Machine Games cover the technical aspects of adding ray traced reflections to Wolfenstein Youngblood. This is one of the first Vulkan based game engines to bring RTX technology to market. We’ll perform a deep dive into the details of managing materials for hit shading in a forward renderer to denoising results, giving programmers and technical artists a solid understanding of what’s involved.
Speakers: Jiho Choi, Dmitry Zhdan, Patrik Willbo, Jim Kjellin
RTX Ray Tracing Best Practices
Wednesday March 18th | 17:00 - 18:00 | South Hall, Room 153
The session walks through what NVIDIA has learned so far from the released RTX titles. It summarizes what you should know when doing your own real time ray tracing effects with NVIDIA RTX hardware. The session covers best practices for API integration, acceleration structure building and use of the ray tracing shaders including the new features available in the DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1. Additionally, it gives practical guidelines for typical ray tracing effects like reflections, shadows, global illumination and transparent reflections.
Speakers: Juha Sjoholm, Paula Jukarainen
Thursday March 19th
A Year in the Trenches with UE4 Ray Tracing: Practical experiences from an engineer
Thursday March 19th | 10:00 - 11:00 | South Hall, Room 153
Ray tracing has now been available in Unreal Engine 4 for a full year. Deliver Us the Moon and Mechwarrior 5 have already released using this support, and more titles are around the corner. This talk will cover challenges and solutions found in the process of helping these games reach this milestone. The talk will cover an array of optimizations and enhancements, including hybrid translucency, that allow these titles to shine. Additionally, the talk will cover further enhancements designed to help the next wave of content. For those working in UE4, you will gain information on techniques you can integrate today to improve your ray tracing results. For those working with custom code, you will gain insights into the types of algorithms and optimizations that you can use to make your own engine great at ray tracing.
Speakers: Evan Hart
Making Ray Traced Content in Unreal Engine 4
Thursday March 19th | 11:30 - 12:30 | South Hall, Room 153
This talk seeks to guide artists and designers in creating and fine tuning their content for Ray Tracing in Unreal Engine 4.
The UE4 implementation of Ray Tracing is very flexible, both in terms of how content is made and how RT features can be mixed with raster ones to best suit a project. Creating content for ray tracing involves some new considerations to fine tune it. These include best practices for materials, meshes, LOD and animated foliage. Designers will have some additional considerations in laying out a map, and lighting artists should be informed on how to best make the transition to RT lighting.
Speakers: Richard Cowgill
Adventures in high definition rendering with integrated tools
Thursday March 19th | 12:45 - 13:45 | South Hall, Room 153 (Lunch Session)
You can't change a tire without a jack and you can't optimize your game without the right tools. In this session, you'll learn about the latest advances in modern graphics tools and how they can speed up your game and improve your productivity. In addition to covering the newest addition to Vulkan Profiling and Crash Debugging Tools (GPU Trace & Nsight Aftermath), you'll learn how to debug your realtime ray tracing application (DXR & NVIDIA VKRay). Learn about how the next generation of graphics tools are evolving to live inside of development environments like the Unity Editor, making iteration and debugging faster than ever.
Speakers: Aurelio Reis, SWE Director, Graphics Developer Tools
DLSS – Image Reconstruction for Real-time Rendering with Deep Learning
Thursday March 19th | 14:00 - 14:45 | South Hall, Room 153
In this talk, Edward Liu from NVIDIA Applied Deep Learning Research delves into the latest research progress on Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), which uses deep learning and the NVIDIA Tensor Cores to reconstruct super sampled frames in real-time. He discusses and demonstrates why scaling and image reconstruction for real-time rendering is an extremely challenging problem, and examines the cause of common artifacts produced by traditional up-sampling techniques. With this background, Edward then shows how the DLSS, deep learning based reconstruction algorithm, achieves better image quality with less input samples than traditional techniques. The talk concludes with a walkthrough of DLSS integration in Unreal Engine 4 and a look at DLSS in the acclaimed sci-fi adventure “Deliver Us The Moon” from KeokeN Interactive.
Speakers: Edward Liu
USD for Collaborative Production in Games
Thursday March 19th | 15:00 - 15:45 | South Hall, Room 153
USD is an open source standard that allows developers to easily interchange data no matter what content creation or game authoring tool your team is using. It allows developers to truly “unlock” their data and solve pain points around the flow of assets inside production studios.
During this talk, we’ll discuss how to use USD for game production and what challenges we’ve been able to solve using USD and Omniverse for collaborative work flows. Having the ability to live link tools such as Unreal Engine, 3DS Max, Maya, and others through USD and Omniverse generates a new and exciting workflow that is no longer bound by arduous import and export processes.
We’ll further discuss how using material standards of interchange, such as MDL, Material X, and USD Shade allows for seamless sharing so that users can use the best tool for the job while remaining contextual to the entire project.
Speakers: Dane Johnston
Optimizing Ray Tracing (DXR/VKR) Implementations in Games using Nsight Systems and Nsight Graphics
Thursday March 19th | 16:00 - 17:00 | South Hall, Room 153
This talk is based on data from shipping game titles, including Wolfenstein: Youngblood (VKR) and Minecraft with RTX (DXR). It shows how Nsight tools can be used to expose performance issues and how to address them: on the CPU side using Nsight Systems, and on the GPU side using Nsight Graphics (specifically, new hardware metrics captured by Nsight Graphics: GPU Trace on Turing GPUs).
Speakers: Louis Bavoil, Dana Elifaz
Fast Denoising with self stabilizing recurrent blurs
Thursday March 19th | 17:30 - 18:30 | South Hall, Room 153
This talk seeks to guide artists and designers in creating and fine tuning their content for Ray Tracing in Unreal Engine 4.
In this topic NVIDIA is going to discuss latest advancements in non-DL based denoising. Basing on previous work from Metro Exodus, a new method has been introduced which is based on recurrent blur too, but it has got a lot of improvements, like: better overall performance, cleaner results, specular denoising support, fast data reconstruction, better bilateral weighting and some others. Besides the algorithm overview the topics will be covered in the talk:
- mipmapping of incoming radiance - is it worth it?
- proper controlling of blur radius to avoid over-blurring
- accurate dis-occlusion detection
- specular tracking without specular motion
- fast and high amplitude noise free data reconstruction of regions with discarded history
- exponential versus linear accumulation. Why linear accumulation is better?
- how to compute bilateral weights in spatial passes?
- input signal compression - should it be used or not?
- how to fight with temporal lag
Speakers: Dmitry Zhdan
Friday March 20th
Capturing the reality of space with RTX in Deliver Us The Moon
Friday March 20th | 10:00 - 11:00 | South Hall, Room 153
KeokeN present their hands-on experience of using ray tracing to enable new graphical realism in Deliver Us The Moon with UE4 and NVIDIA’s RTX technology. Conventional graphics content is optimized for rasterization, but not for real time ray tracing. Simply flipping the ray tracing switch will most likely result in a poor user experience. It is imperative to evaluate the content for its ray tracing performance and apply necessary adjustments to achieve the best possible result. The adjustments consist of material and lighting tweaks, balancing of UE4 ray tracing features and sometimes even geometry changes. NVIDIA explains some of the core technology and how to identify and fix your ray tracing performance issues.
Speakers: Vladimir Bondarev, Daniel Torkar
Streaming Graphics with RTXGI
Friday March 20th | 11:30 - 12:00 | South Hall, Room 153
We go behind the scenes of our research tech demo showing the RTXGI SDK running asynchronously on a server. By computing lighting updates on the server, we provide dynamic real-time global illumination for a thin mobile PC or XR client. Our technique generalizes easily to multiple clients and is robust to high network latency. Our demonstration is a proof of concept of ray tracing as a service.
Speakers: Zander Majercik
Minecraft with RTX: Crafting a real-time path-tracer for gaming
Friday March 20th | 12:15 - 13:15 | South Hall, Room 153 (Lunch Session)
Engineers from NVIDIA and Microsoft cover the technical aspects of adding path tracing to the hugely popular Minecraft. We'll walk through the technology and engineering that went into creating the RTX version of Minecraft; a glimpse at the technical decisions and process involved in the NVIDIA/Microsoft collaboration, and a deep dive into the details of the ray tracing and denoising.
Speakers: Oli, Jakub, Michael Seydl,
Creating Physically Based Materials for Minecraft with RTX
Friday March 20th | 13:30 - 14:30 | South Hall, Room 153
We will describe and demonstrate the tools and pipeline that enable anyone to create physically based materials for ray tracing in Minecraft with RTX. We will create traditional 16x16 physical textures, as well as high definition ones and demonstrate them in Minecraft, with characteristics such as metallicity, roughness, emissivity and transparency. This talk serves as a great visual and practical introduction to ray tracing basics, physically based rendering and materials, and modding Minecraft with RTX.
Speakers: Paula Jukarainen, Kelsey Blanton, Joel Garvin
Decoupled Graphics
Friday March 20th | 15:00 - 16:00 | South Hall, Room 153
I present a NVIDIA research vision of a cloud graphics pipeline to power future gaming experiences. A distributed graphics environment connected by 5G can combine the realistic physics, character AI, and lighting quality capabilities of data center GPU computation with Esports levels of low latency and high refresh rates on mobile and XR platforms.
Speakers: Morgan McGuire