Session Title

Description

Block Compression Smorgasbord

DXT style block compression has become a de facto standard for most textures in games.  We will cover several topics of recent interest in this area:

1. Fast block compression. With some optimization effort, real-time block compression is feasible, on either the CPU or the GPU. Real-time compression opens up a host of possibilities for disk space reduction and dynamic texture updates.  

2. Normal map compression. Block compression was designed for color data but adapted for use with normal maps. The results are not always pretty. What usage patterns should be favored, or avoided, in this context?

3. New block compression formats. DirectX 11 introduced two brand new formats:  BC6H for HDR textures and BC7 for high quality LDR textures. We discuss how and when these formats should be employed, and how to handle the enormous search space for compression.
 

Building an Uber-Fast Crowd Renderer for Your Next Xbox 360 Engine

Rendering thousands of highly detailed, unique soft-skinned characters with shadows at 30 Hz on an Xbox 360 console requires a highly tuned rendering pipeline. A new type of instancing renderer that uses the GPU’s memexport feature is introduced here and compared to some other common, but less optimal, forms of crowd rendering. The renderer uses very limited CPU resources and is memory-conscious. This talk showcases an interactive, real-time demo.  Some features of the crowd renderer are: Highly tuned VMX animation; Memexport, vfetch, and tfetch techniques; Entire crowd is skinned and transformed with a single draw call and exported to memory for rapid depth prepass, shadow generation and color generation passes.

The Dark Art of Shadow Mapping

Adding shadows depth maps to a title is straightforward and simple. Making the shadows look good while staying within artistic, performance, and memory constraints can be very difficult. This talk explains how common shadow mapping artifacts occur and gives some basic guidelines that should be followed at all times. Next, the talk explains advanced techniques that benefit shadow maps, such as cascaded shadow maps, filtering, pancaking, and deferred shadows. Finally, the intricacies and caveats of combining these techniques are described.  Attendees should come away understanding how to identify artifacts, which techniques will mitigate them, and at what cost.

DirectX 11 Technology Update

Direct3D 11 is out and ready for use by your game today to exploit the latest in video hardware features as well as current generation machines. This talk brings you up to speed with the API, offers tips on how to get your renderer up and running, presents key feature overviews, and shows how to deploy your application. Attending this talk is highly recommended if you are attending other DirectX 11 presentations.

Fast GPU-based Scene Analysis and Post-Processing

The latest games use increasingly intensive scene post-processing techniques to deliver amazing visuals. Many of these techniques have traditionally required scene analysis on the CPU to drive adjustments to post-processing settings in a realistic way. This presentation demonstrates the use of a GPU-based sort to enable additional control of such post-processing, as well as prevent costly CPU synchronization and analysis. A variety of new post-processing effects that can be achieved will be demonstrated as well. This technique works well on Xbox 360 and scales nicely on all modern shader hardware.

The Xbox 360 GPU used to be a mysterious beast, but by now it’s pretty well understood. Despite implementing all the various tips and tricks over the years, it gets harder every day to find new ways to improve performance. And now that Microsoft has relaxed the Xbox 360 TCRs on resolution and MSAA, your competitors are already taking advantage of the new rules to increase scene complexity while boosting their frame rate. We present our findings on various experiments with lower-resolution rendering, and introduce the concept of sandboxing the GPU using real scene data extracted from PIX captures. Add in the usual grab bag of miscellaneous tips and techniques learned over the years and this is a must-attend event for any Xbox 360 graphics developer.

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Session Title

Description

Enabling User-Generated Content in your Xbox LIVE Games    

This talk presents an overview of policy and technical requirements for enabling user-generated content (UGC). The presentation includes a high-level overview of potential benefits, challenges, and requirements around enabling UGC on the Xbox LIVE platform, as well as an overview of technical recommendations on how to best satisfy those requirements.
 

Come learn how we are going to make finding developer content, and submitting and certifying content, much easier. This talk discusses the new investments around a new developer site and submission process.
 

How Microsoft Can Help You Make Great Games



 

Publisher Revenue Opportunities on Xbox LIVE Marketplace


 

How can publishers maximize their revenue potential on Xbox LIVE Marketplace? We’ll tell you. We cover LIVE Arcade, Game Add-ons, Avatar Marketplace, Demos, and Games on Demand.

This talk offers a comprehensive look at the Games for Windows - LIVE platform, demonstrating that it is much more than just ”Xbox LIVE on Windows” and answering the question “Why Games for Windows - LIVE?” for publishers.
 

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