Speaker Sessions

Title: Tools - Roadmap and Demo
Speaker: Bill Bilodeau
Speaker Biography: Bill has been a graphics programmer in the game industry for seven years. He is currently at ATI in Santa Clara working as an ISV engineer. His duties involve helping game developers with graphics issues, developing samples and documentation for the ATI SDK, and educating developers about new graphics technology. Prior to ATI, Bill worked as a game developer, and also spent ten years developing desktop publishing software. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

This presentation will provide an overview of the current and future tools ATI provides to developers. Demonstrations of current tools such as RenderMonkey and the PIX plug-in in addition to future performance analysis tools currently in development will be given. Lastly, a roadmap of future tools development will be presented.

Title: DirectX Graphics Performance - Getting Every Bit You Can
Speaker: Guennadi Riguer
Speaker Biography: Guennadi is an ISV Engineer at ATI Technologies, where he is helping game engine developers to adopt new graphics technologies. Guennadi holds a degree in Computer Science from York University and has previously studied at Belorussian State University of Computing and Electronics. Prior to joining ATI Technologies he has worked on a variety of software development projects.

A cold and objective look at the performance aspects of DirectX games from the basic guidelines of what to do and why, though the all too often subtle interactions of programming techniques, and ending with a close look at a small handful of those special apps that either fail or achieve in a spectacular way. Most importantly you’ll leave with a handful of recommendations that allow you to detect and cure the commonest failings of 90% of the cases that games developers meet.

Title: ATI SDK, Crossfire, Cobra video CODEC SDK
Speaker: Bill Bilodeau, Guennadi Riguer
ATI’s Software Developer's Kit (SDK) is intended to provide developers with the inside scoop on getting the most out of ATI’s latest products using Microsoft® DirectX® or OpenGL for 3D graphics. The SDK is a compilation of new and previously posted information from the Developer Relations web site. Overviews of ATI’s new Crossfire and Cobra video CODEC API’s will also to be provided.

Title: Irradiance Volumes for Games
Speaker: Chris Oat
Speaker Biography: Chris Oat is a senior software engineer in the 3D Application Research Group at ATI where he explores novel rendering techniques for real-time 3D graphics applications. As a member of ATI's demo team, his focus is on shader development for current and future graphics platforms. He has published several articles in the ShaderX and Game Programming Gems series and has presented at game developer conferences around the world.

Irradiance volumes have been used by the film industry as an acceleration technique for high quality, photorealistic offline rendering. These volumes store irradiance distribution functions for points in space by utilizing some spatial partitioning structure that serves as a cache. Sampling the volume allows the global illumination of a point to be quickly calculated. Until recently, irradiance volumes were impractical for interactive rendering because of their high storage and bandwidth requirements but it has been shown that spherical harmonics may be used for efficiently compressing and integrating irradiance samples thus making pre-computed irradiance volumes practical for real time rendering. Adaptive sampling and storage techniques will be discussed for optimizing preprocess and runtime computation costs. Generating spherical harmonic gradients for storing and evaluating irradiance gradients will also be presented. Pixel and vertex shader code will be provided to demonstrate how this data can be efficiently used at runtime for highly realistic real time lighting. Attendees will come away from this lecture will valuable insight into the theory and practical implementation details for adding irradiance volume support to their next gen title.

Title: Practical Parallax Occlusion Mapping
Speaker: Natalya Tatarchuk
Speaker Biography: Natalya Tatarchuk is a staff demo engineer in the demo group of ATI's 3D Application Research Group, where she is investigating novel graphics techniques in the real-time domain for current and future platforms. In the past she has been the lead for the tools group at ATI Research, working on the RenderMonkey shader IDE. Natalya has been in the graphics industry for many years, having previously worked on haptic 3D modeling software, scientific visualization libraries, and other projects. She has published articles in various technical book series such as ShaderX and Game Programming Gems, and has presented talks at Siggraph and at Game Developers Conferences worldwide. Natalya graduated with BA's in Computers Science and Mathematics from Boston University. She is currently pursuing an MS in Computer Science with a concentration in Graphics at Harvard University

This presentation will review several existing techniques for normal mapping, displacement mapping and parallax mapping in the context of games. Pros and cons of each approach will be discussed in relation to their relevance to the game content creation pipeline and rendering. Additionally, we will present a novel algorithm for rendering complex geometric surfaces with perspective-correct details and soft self-occlusion based shadows under varying light conditions. This technique, titled “parallax occlusion mapping”, can be used effectively to generate an illusion of complex geometry exhibiting correct motion parallax as well as producing very convincing self-shadowing effects. It takes advantage of the per-pixel capabilities of the latest graphics hardware to compute all necessary quantities using the programmable pipeline. The applicability of this technique to arbitrary polygonal surfaces and its easy integration into existing art pipelines with support for standard normal mapping tools makes it highly relevant for game developers. The method takes advantage of the new features of the latest generation of graphics hardware as well as the next generation console hardware giving higher visual results fidelity and improved performance over other techniques. Additionally, we will present a continuous level-of-detail approach with smooth transitions for parallax occlusion mapping.

Title: Shadow Mapping Techniques
Speaker: John Isidoro
Speaker Biography: John R. Isidoro is a member of the 3D Applications Research Group at ATI Research where he works on cutting edge graphics techniques for cutting edge graphics hardware. He has coauthored several articles in graphics programming books including ShaderX 1, 2, and 3 and Game Programming Gems 2 and 3. He has also given presentations at conferences including Siggraph, 3DPVT, Gametech and GDC, on topics ranging from Fur Rendering, to non-rigid object tracking, to 3D reconstruction.

Shadow mapping is a powerful technique for shadow computation, and is rapidly becoming prevalent in next generation games due to the ubiquitousness of high precision pixel shading capabilities in modern graphics hardware. However shadow mapping algorithms are often plagued by blocky aliasing artifacts and precision based bias issues.

This talk describes a variety of shader based methods to improve both the filtering quality and the performance of shadow mapping algorithms in order to alleviate these problems in an efficient manner. A variety of approaches will be compared and contrasted, and a number of small but novel improvements to each algorithm will be discussed.

Title: Demo Team Secrets: The Next Generation
Speakers: Natalya Tatarchuk, John Isidoro, Chris Oat, Daniel Ginsburg
As graphics hardware becomes more powerful it has become increasingly difficult for programmers and artists to figure out just what to do with all of it. In this talk, the demo team from ATI describes a number of practical effects from past and future demos that take advantage of leading edge hardware.

Title: Out-of-Core Rendering with Progressive Buffers
Speaker: John Isidoro
We introduce a novel out-of-core view-dependent level of detail rendering system designed with modern GPU architectures in mind. Our approach keeps the data in static buffers and geomorphs between different LODs using per-vertex weights for seamless transition. Our method is the first such system to support texture mapping, including a mechanism for texture LOD. This approach completely avoids LOD pops and boundary cracks while gracefully adapting to a specified framerate or level of detail. Our method is suitable for all classes of GPUs that provide basic vertex shader programmability. The contributions of our work include an entire preprocessing and rendering system for view-dependent LOD rendering by geomorphing static buffers using different per-vertex weights, a vertex buffer tree to minimize the number of API draw calls when rendering coarse-level geometry, and automatic methods for efficient, transparent LOD control.

Title: OpenGL ES
Speaker: Daniel Ginsburg
Speaker Biography: Daniel Ginsburg is currently a Senior Software Engineer on the demo team in the 3D Application Research Group at ATI Research, where he works on the launch demos for ATI cards. Prior to joining the 3DARG, Dan worked on the OpenGL driver team for over four years, focusing most of his efforts on implementing new extensions. Prior to joining ATI, Dan worked for n-Space, Inc., an Orlando-based game development company. Dan graduated with a BS in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and is currently pursuing an MBA part-time at Bentley College.

OpenGL ES 2.0 represents a major milestone in the convergence of graphics capabilities between desktop and handheld gaming devices. The OpenGL ES 2.0 specification introduces the majority of the functionality used by today’s desktop games into the embedded space. The new version of OpenGL ES will have a major impact on mobile game developers. In keeping with the design goal of removing any redundancy from the API, the Khronos group has completely removed fixed-function vertex/pixel processing. While this change ushers in the shader era to mobile gaming, it also means that mobile game developers will need to make significant changes to their applications. It is the goal of this presentation to review in detail what has changed in OpenGL ES 2.0 and what the changes mean for mobile game development.

The presentation will begin by briefly reviewing the history and design goals that drove the OpenGL ES specification. The changes to the OpenGL ES API for version 2.0 will then be discussed from three different directions: what has changed in GLSL, what is new relative to OpenGL ES 1.1, and what has changed from OpenGL 2.0 on the desktop.

Title: Optimizing Handheld Games for ATI’s IMAGEON™ 2300
Speaker: Claude Benoit
Speaker Biography: Claude Benoit, M.Sc.A., MBA
Claude is a biomedical engineer by trade, and has done research in 3D medical imaging and low-power medical instrumentation. For the past 17 years, he has been doing 3D computer graphics software development including a 5 year term at SOFTIMAGE where he was involved in everything rendering. He is a Technical Evangelist at ATI’s Handheld Division where he promotes the IMAGEON™ product line.

3D mobile games running on current generation cell phone are driven by software rendering engines. Given the platforms’ low CPU horsepower, it’s a constant battle between image quality and rendering performance, where interactivity is on the losing end. Enters the IMAGEON™ 2300, a full-featured 3D hardware solution for mobile phones. The tables are now turned in favour of stunning image quality, smoother interaction, and overall better gameplay and immersion. This presentation describes the IMAGEON™ 2300 internals and how to push 3D mobile games to the next level on next generation handsets.

Title: ATI’s Handheld Software Developer's Kit
Speaker: Alan Roach
Speaker Biography: Alan is a member of the Handheld ISV Relations team at ATI. He is focused on providing technical support and consultation to handheld software developers and coordinating ATI's SDK projects for the Imageon product line. Alan's background is in 3D software development, and he has a Bachelor of Math degree in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.

ATI’s Handheld Software Developer's Kit (SDK) is intended to provide developers with the inside scoop on getting the most out of ATI’s latest Handheld products.

Title: Publisher/Developer Handheld Platform Overview
Speaker: Jill Braff
Speaker Biography: Jill Braff, General Manager of North America & Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Game industry veteran Jill Braff leads Glu Mobile's corporate and consumer marketing initiatives, including co-marketing programs with licensors and carriers. Braff most recently consulted with Sega of America as interim vice president of marketing and as a creative director at Konami of America. She also worked with Sprint on its entry into 3G wireless gaming. Prior to that, Braff held senior marketing positions at Photopoint Corporation and MyFamily.com. She also held positions at The Learning Company, Griffin Bacal and Nintendo of America. Braff has a B.A. from Colgate University.

Why Mobile Matters – “GUI Speaks Out About the transition from 2D to 3D and the challenges associated with that."

Learn about the key factors driving this revolution. Get a better understanding of how game creators, build for the future and what challenges are faced in today’s market.

Title: Qualcomm Gaming Road Map
Speaker: Dave Ligon, Senior Product Manager, QUALCOMM CDMA Technologies
Speaker Biography: David Ligon is responsible for the strategic definition and development of QUALCOMM CDMA Technologies (QCT) product offerings for wireless 3D graphics, gaming and content. Prior to joining QUALCOMM, Ligon worked at Apple Computer, Inc. where he led an architecture group that developed a video processor, and was also responsible for the initial CODEC and effects microcode for that architecture. Ligon also worked for Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), where he was responsible for developing algorithms for advanced 3D graphics and 2D imaging hardware, multiprocessing and high-bandwidth data transfer architecture.

Attend this session and you will walk away with an understanding of QUALCOMM's MSM chipset roadmap for graphics, audio and location based technologies for gaming. You will hear descriptions of QUALCOMM developed graphics subsystems as well as MSM chipsets incorporating ATI's graphics technology. You will also get a better understanding of BREW API technologies including standards, tools and performance, on a per chip basis. This session will give you a good context for session T-602: Optimizing for the MSM platform: Developing Games for Current and Upcoming Chipset Platforms.