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GDC is a week-long celebration of the art, craft, and business of game development and represents a unique opportunity for developers to get up to speed on advances in the field.
Presenters: Bobby Thankdi (XR Games); Jamie Healey (XR Games); Brent Insko (Intel)
Time: Monday, March 21, 5:30p.m. - 6:30p.m.
The team at XR Games wanted to bring the March 2021 launch of Zombieland VR: Headshot Fever to as many platforms as possible, as seamlessly as possible. To do that, XR Games built Zombieland VR: Headshot Fever in Unity and utilized OpenXR, the open standard from the Khronos Group that provides high-performance access to AR/VR devices. This session looks at how XR Games began its development process, examines the goals that they needed to achieve and how those goals lead their development team to choose OpenXR. They will review what worked and didn't work and give a postmortem discussion of the development process with OpenXR.
In this session, Brent Insko, Lead XR Architect for Intel and OpenXR Chair, is joined by Founder and CEO of XR Games, Bobby Thandi and Head of Development, Jamie Healey to discuss the development of Zombieland VR: Headshot Fever, the motivation for using OpenXR, and the direct and wider benefits.
Presenter: Bryan Dudash (NVIDIA)
Time: Monday, March 21, 3:50p.m. - 4:20p.m.
Ray tracing is becoming quite prevalent in AAA games. However, to make use of this new technology a game engine must generally create a BVH of all scene geometry and bind all materials active in the scene. This requirement is often at odds with the dynamic nature of scene composition and material systems. Kickstart RT presents a novel cross-API (Direct3D11, Direct3D12 & Vulkan), cross-platform (win64 & ARM) solution that caches direct lighting information into a world space structure that is then used to ray trace reflections, GI and shadows. In this talk, we'll deep dive into the mechanisms and the algorithm used in Kickstart RT, and show off the quality and performance compared to traditional ray tracing and reference path tracing. The aim of this technology is to enable many developers to add ray tracing effects to their game engine in a much shorter timespan than it might otherwise take and to bring ray tracing to developers still using Direct3D11.
Presenter: Martin-Karl Lefrancois (NVIDIA)
Time: Wednesday, March 23, 9:00a.m. - 10:00a.m.
This presentation will be covering the required steps to create simple and more complex Vulkan applications. Using the nvpro-samples framework, we will start with the most important aspects of Vulkan programming. This includes creating Vulkan context, memory allocation, creating pipelines for raster and ray tracing. From this sample, we will show how other technologies can be integrated, such as NVIDIA Nsight Aftermath, OptiX denoiser, NVIDIA real-time denoiser (NRD) and other advanced rendering techniques. The sample is part of nvpro-samples which is a collection of examples for Vulkan. For example, you will find a Vulkan tutorial on ray tracing, where ray tracing is added, step by step, to a raster renderer. Among this tutorial there is also a collection of very specific ray tracing features, like animation, motion blur, reflection, but it also covers more intensively the use of shading-binding-table (SBT), parallel shading pipelines, ray query, anyhit as well as intersection shader, and much more.
Presenter: Aurelio Reis (NVIDIA)
Time: Wednesday, March 23, 11:30a.m. - 12:00p.m.
In this session, the presenter will provide an overview of the graphics features that exist in multiple NVIDIA Developer Tools. They'll review some of the great features that can be used in Nsight Graphics to debug and profile graphics applications using Vulkan, D3D12 and Ray Tracing, as well as introduce cutting edge new features. The audience will be introduced to the Nsight PerfSDK, which allows developers to integrate NVIDIA DevTools directly into their applications. Finally, we'll have a look at Nsight Aftermath, an invaluable tool that let's engineers understand the reasons for why their GPU is crashing and save time and effort by locating exactly where the crash occurs in their code.
Presenter: Dan Buckstein (Infinity Ward)
Time: Wednesday, March 23, 3:30p.m. - 4:30p.m.
From OpenGL to Vulkan, from drawing the first triangle to building complex, multi-platform frameworks, from indie to professional, there are stories and takeaways from every stage in the career "pipeline" of a graphics programmer. This seminar takes a deep dive into the adventure of an indie graphics programmer and educator-turned-developer, covering the lessons learned during that time and how they have been both helpful and detrimental. The talk covers relatable advice that will guide those looking to explore graphics programming as a new career or a tangential part of an existing job. Furthermore, the talk highlights how other disciplines of game development can become involved with graphics programming and how we can break those barriers. This seminar contains a wealth of technical experience and advice for anyone interested in pursuing a career or enjoying their hobby in the evolving discipline of real-time rendering.
Presenter: Roberto Lopez Mendez (Arm)
Time: Thursday, March 24, 2:00p.m. - 2:30p.m.
Style Transfer is a powerful technique which allows to combine one image with the style of another for a custom or new look. In this in-depth session, Arm will introduce Style Transfer as an ML graphics post-processing step and highlight its potential as the ultimate game rendering customization tool. Relevant Khronos Vulkan and OpenCL extensions will be discussed, as they are used to avoid any copying of the rendered image when passing it for ML processing. The implementation will be discussed in detail and a live demo running on mobile GPU will be presented.
Presenter: Johannes Deligiannis (NVIDIA)
Time: Thursday, March 24, 5:00p.m. - 6:00p.m.
Ray tracing is becoming quite prevalent in AAA games. However, to make use of this new technology a game engine must generally create a bounding volume hierarchy of all scene geometry and bind all materials active in the scene. This requirement is often at odds with the dynamic nature of scene composition and material systems. Kickstart RT presents a novel cross-API (Direct3D11, Direct3D12 & Vulkan), cross-platform (win64 & ARM) solution that caches direct lighting information into a world space structure that is then used to ray trace reflections, GI, and shadows. This technology shortens development time due to a simpler and less-invasive integration of adding ray-tracing effects to a game engine, and it brings ray tracing to developers still using Direct3D11. We'll introduce the mechanisms and the algorithm used in Kickstart RT, and show off the quality and performance compared to traditional ray tracing and reference path tracing.
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