Presentations

GDC 2005 Video

Title: Advanced Visual Effects with Direct3D
ATI Speakers: Jason Mitchell, Richard Huddy, Natalya Tatarchuk

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Description:
Brought to you with the collaboration of the industry's leading hardware and software vendors, this day-long tutorial provides an in-depth look at the Direct3D technologies in DirectX 9 and how they can be applied to cutting-edge game graphics. After a review of the latest API improvements and shader models, a variety of special effects which illustrate their use in game content are discussed and demonstrated. This includes detailed presentations from ATI’s demo team as well as top game developers who ship real games into the marketplace. In addition to illustrating the details of rendering advanced real-time visual effects, this tutorial covers a series of vendor-neutral optimizations that developers need to keep in mind when designing their engines and shaders.

Title: Next Generation Rendering With OpenGL.
ATI Speakers: Evan Hart, Bill Licea-Kane

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Description:
Brought to you with the collaboration of the industry's leading graphics hardware vendors, this day-long tutorial provides an in-depth look at the latest technologies in OpenGL, and how they can be applied to next generation game graphics. The tutorial includes detailed descriptions of the latest features of OpenGL 2.0 and the latest extensions, followed by several case-studies of new rendering effects that are enabled by these features. The tutorial also focuses on optimizing shaders for maximum interactive performance.

Title: DirectX Graphics Performance - getting every bit you can.
Speaker: Richard Huddy

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Description:
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.

Speaker’s Bio:
Richard Huddy has managed the European Developer Relations group within ATI since the summer of 2002 and has worked in games for more than 14 years. For most of that time, he has specialized in high-performance 3D graphics. He worked with both RenderMorphics and Criterion Software developing their low-level APIs before moving on to work as a device driver writer specializing in Direct3D optimization. Immediately before joining ATI, Richard spent four years at NVIDIA running their European Developer Relations team. Richard's primary focus is now teaching game programmers how to get the best from modern high-performance architectures using Direct3D. Richard has been a regular contributor at Microsoft's Meltdown conferences and taught at the annual GDC, GDCE, EDF and Creativity events. He lives in England and is proud of that fact.

Title: Precomputed Radiance Transfer and Spherical Harmonic Lighting Techniques for Games
Speaker: Chris Oat

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Description:
Pre-computed Radiance Transfer (PRT) and Spherical Harmonic (SH) based lighting solutions have entered the mainstream of real-time graphics. This relatively new lighting technique offers many advantages to engine programmers in both performance and advanced lighting realism. Pre-sampled irradiance and irradiance gradients for non-distant, mid-range lighting will be discussed along with methods for using PRT with dynamic, deformable geometry. This presentation will also cover lighting algorithms that mix PRT with more traditional lighting techniques.

Speaker's Bio:
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.

Title: Bringing Hollywood to Real-time
Speaker: Abe Wiley

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Description:
Artists face a variety of issues when designing art that pushes the limits of next generation hardware, as the market demands that games look more and more like films yet still render in real time. This talk looks at techniques for taking Hollywood style effects intended for film and recreating them on next generation graphics hardware.

The talk will address issues faced by ATI's 3D Application Research Group's art team in the creation of the Ruby demos which were created in partnership with RhinoFX, a film and video post-production house. Topics discussed will include communication challenges between a film house and a real-time house, the production pipeline which evolved, and specific solutions for creating a cinematic look using graphics hardware.

Speaker’s Bio:
Abe Wiley is a 3D Artist in ATI’s 3D Application Research Group where he works on graphics demos as part of ATI’s Demo Team. Abe recently joined ATI after 4 years in the game industry where he worked as a 3D artist and animator at Impressions Games, a Cambridge MA based game development company that focused on Real Time Strategy Games. Prior to that, he worked for The Big Machine as a 3D artist and animator on several television spots, including Station ID animations for The Discovery Channel. Abe received his BFA degree in Computer Graphics from Syracuse University.

Title: Effects Breakdown - How’d They Do That
Speakers: Thorsten Scheuermann, Natalya Tatarchuk, Daniel Ginsburg

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Description:
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.

Note: This talk overlaps with the booth crawl in the exhibition. To ensure that attendees don’t miss out on valuable drinking time, beer will be provided during the break.

Speaker Bio’s:
Thorsten Scheuermann is a senior software engineer in ATI’s 3D Application Research Group where he works on graphics demos and novel rendering techniques as part of ATI’s Demo Team. He has published articles in ShaderX3 and Game Programming Gems 5 and has given presentations at GDC and SIGGRAPH. Prior to working at ATI Thorsten was a member of the Effective Virtual Environments research group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thorsten received a Master’s degree in Computer Science from UNC and previously studied at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.

Natalya is a Senior Software Engineer in the ATI’s 3D Application Research Group where she is investigating innovative graphics techniques in the real-time domain for current and future platforms as a contributor in the demo group. In the past she has been the lead for the tools group at the 3D Application Research Group, working on a pioneering real-time shader development environment RenderMonkeyTM IDE. Natalya has been in the graphics industry for many years, previously working on award-winning haptic 3D modeling software, scientific visualization libraries and various other projects. She has published articles in the ShaderX books, Game Programming Gems, Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com, amongst others. She has presented novel techniques at various conferences throughout the world, including Siggraph sketches and presentations, GDC, GDC-Europe, Microsoft Meltdown and Russian GDCs. Natalya graduated with BAs in Computers Science and Mathematics from Boston University and is currently pursuing an MS in Computer Science with concentration in Graphics at Harvard University.

Dan 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. He has worked on features for the Rage128 and Radeon-series OpenGL drivers including cubemaps, 3-D textures, full-scene anti-aliasing, fragment shaders, and GLSL. He has also participated in specifying several OpenGL extensions that have been approved by the Architecture Review Board (ARB). 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.

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