GDC’09, ShaderX7
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009I’m out at GDC now. The first two days have been pretty low-key. I spent the day yesterday in the Advanced D3D tutorial and today in the Insomniac PS3 programming tutorial. AD3D had some interesting tidbits, I think ATI and NVIDIA will have slides up shortly. Unfortunately I can’t access the slides that GDC has online for attendees for some reason. The Insomniac session had a really good introduction to Cell programming, how they do gameplay updates on SPUs, a talk on debugging the SPUs that went a bit over my weary head, and a talk on some of their PS3 graphics work for Resistance and Ratchet & Clank. They’re using a sort of halfway lighting pre-pass technique where they render out the normals and specular power, then compute deferred lighting into a buffer, then do a forward pass where they just grab the direct lighting from the previous pass’ results. It wasn’t exactly clear to me how they were doing this with MSAA. All the deferred lighting is computed once per pixel but their forward pass is MSAA. So inevitably their MSAA samples are going to be grabbing incorrect lighting information from the lighting buffer, or so it seems to me.
Overall it looks like attendance is way down this year. This is a shame because I think this year has the best content out of the three years I’ve gone. The lineup for the next three days is solid: Killzone 2 rendering, Gears of War 2 rendering, Larrabee talks, terrain rendering in Halo Wars, a few talks on PS3 programming, etc.
I got my copy of ShaderX7 in the mail the other day. There are lots of neat little articles packed within the monstrous 800 page book. Unfortunately, myself and my co-authors were excluded from the bios and authors list due to some error, but the article found its way in (under the title “Deferred Occlusion from Analytic Surfaces”).