I attended the “Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games” class today at SIGGRAPH. This is the third year in a row Natasha Tatarchuk from AMD has organized this class. Each year different game developers as well as people from the AMD demo team are brought in to talk about graphics, and some of the best real-time stuff at SIGGRAPH in the last two years has been in this course.
Unfortunately, due to Little Big Planet crunch, Alex Evans from Media Molecule was unable to give his planned talk and a different speaker was brought in instead. This was a bit of a bummer since Alex’s SIGGRAPH 2006 talk was very good and I was hoping to hear more about his unorthodox take on real-time rendering.
The remaining talks were of high quality, including talks by the developers of games such as Halo 3, Starcraft 2 and Crysis. Unlike previous years, where it took many weeks for the course notes to be available online, the full course notes are already available at AMD’s Technical Publications page – check them out!
I think it is worth mentioning the speaker that filled in for Alex Evans. It was Vincent Scheib from Emergent talking about command buffers for DX9 and DX10. This was not *new* information, since he presented it previously, but still interesting. He mentioned it on his blog:
http://beautifulpixels.blogspot.com/2008/08/heading-to-siggraph-2008.html