My Graphics Hardware'08 slides online

The slides for my presentation The Intersection of Game Engines and GPUs - Current & Future from Graphics Hardware 08 is now online at the conference site together with about half of the other talks. The rest of them should hopefully be up shortly.

This was the first time I attended the Graphics Hardware conference and I must say I enjoyed the conference very much. It was quite small with only ~80 people attending in total so you could almost get to know everyone at the conference which was great. Most people were either researchers/students from universities or from the hardware vendors (primarily Nvidia and Intel), but there also were a few ISVs although no other game developers as far as I know ( = more attention to yours truly).

Was initially a bit skeptical about Sarajevo before the conference and didn't really know what to expect. But the lovely warm weather, perfect blue sky, cozy city center and the outgoing and friendly locals quickly won me over. They've done an amazing job of rebuilding the city and their lives after enduring the long siege during the Bosnian War. Would love to return to Sarajevo some day again.

My actual keynote talk went really well and was well received by an interested audience (always a plus). Didn't start preparing and writing for it early enough but spent some very late hours in the hotel the day before to structure the talk better and to reduce the length of it to fit the 1 hour schedule. Managed to squeeze in a whole lot of topics and future rendering use cases but also had to cut away some very interesting topics such as real-time REYES rendering, displacement mapping usages and non-rendering raytracing usages. Could have easily talked for 2-3 hours instead of 1 :)

Some of the my slides might not make much sense separate from the actual presentation, so post a comment or send me a mail if you have any questions. Video & audio was recorded at the conference as well but I'm not sure if that will be made available online.

Of the other papers and presentations at the conference I found all to be of interest although of varying applicability for us (not unexpectedly). For example mapping to and parallelizing graph data structures on GPUs is an area we (games) will surely run into in a near future as we create more complex and interesting AI & general irregular data relationships.


Overall an excellent conference and I hope to attend it again next year, believe it will be hosted together with Siggraph in New Orleans (yey).

Next up conference-wise this summer for me is Gamefest and the Microsoft GAB (Graphics Architecture Board) meeting in Seattle in a few weeks and after that Siggraph in LA.