Some seven links to keep you busy while we digest HPG and SIGGRAPH:

• Pictures of HPG and SIGGRAPH – even though just about everyone at these conferences has a camera in some form on them, we just about never take pictures. I decided to try to photograph anyone I recognized this year.
• Tim Sweeney’s HPG keynote slides – I didn’t attend the keynote, unfortunately, but heard about it. Main takeaway for me is that programming these highly parallel machines is hard, and the more that IHVs can do to ease the burden and remove limitations the more successful they will be.
• While waiting for our HPG reports, read Steve Worley’s.
• The course notes for “Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games” will be up in a few weeks, if not sooner. Crytek’s presentation is available at their website.
• The “Beyond Programmable Shading” course notes are available now. I particularly liked Johan Andersson’s talk, partially for the sheer complexity of it all. The various factors that affect making a game engine fast are a bit mind-boggling.
• The place to go for interactive ray tracing development information is the ompf.org forum.
• This was the first year ever that I didn’t attend the Electronic Theater. Well, I did attend the first half-hour (live real-time demos), but then found myself looking at my watch as colorful but meaningless things occurred on the screen. I think the fact that we could attend the E.T. without needing a ticket meant that I could keep putting it off and also wouldn’t feel I lost anything if I missed it. If SIGGRAPH had issued me a ticket for a specific night, I suspect I would have willingly stayed for all of it, not wanting to lose the value of the ticket. Psychology. All that said, the best colorful but meaningless real-time demo I saw was “DT4 Identity SA“, freeware which runs on a Mac and is quite charming.