Gathering feedback: 5 Major Challenges in Real-Time Rendering (2012)

For SIGGRAPH 2012 now soon in August I'll be doing a new talk about "5 Major Challenges in Real-Time Rendering" in the Beyond Programmable Shading course. 2 years ago I also did a talk on the same topic at SIGGRAPH 2010 so this will be an new version based on where we as an industry are today and list important challenges to try and solve in the next 2-5 years, or even longer in some cases. 

The original 2010 talk about the challenges I talked about then can be found on SlideShare or as a PowerPoint.

For this new talk I want to do it a little bit differently and try and focus even more on the concrete big use cases, why they are important and what needs to be solved to achieve them. Hopefully this will be a good inspiration, motivation and prioritization for future research and development within the different areas of real-time rendering.

Just like last time, I would appreciate any feedback from fellow developers & researchers about what you think are the most important issues and use cases that you would like to see solved real-time rendering in the next 5+ years and why those use cases are important + if you have ideas on how to solve them. 

Gathering broad feedback from people in the industry will be very useful to get a wide understanding of how we as an industry would like to go forward and what problems are the most important to solve. 

If you have any feedback/comments/examples please do post it here and I'll try and include it. Can also message me on twitter (use #rend5 hashtag), post in the Google+ thread or mail me at repi (at) dice.se.

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

Shiny PC Graphics in Battlefield 3

I did a keynote presentation at GeforceLAN 6 out in Alameda, California, a few weeks ago about the graphics in the PC version of Battlefield 3 and how we have built up all the visuals with tons of individual components.

The full one hour video of the talk can be found in Youtube in 5 parts:

DICE at GDC'11

Game Developers Conference was good this year! More & better in-depth technical talks then last year and was a major event for us at DICE as we did a big showing of BF3 to the press and had 5 talks about Battlefield 3 and Frostbite 2 topics at the conference.

All the slides from the presentations are now up on http://publications.dice.se as PowerPoint, PDF and (in some cases) Keynote files. Many of them include speaker notes but if you are only interested in quickly glossing over them the below embedded slideshares can be good.

If you have any feedback or questions about any of the topics feel free to add a comment, send a mail or a tweet to @repi (me), @ChristinaCoffin, @Daniel_Collin or @ZigguratVertigo (Colin Barre-Brisebois)!

DirectX 11 Rendering in Battlefield 3

SPU-Based Deferred Shading in BATTLEFIELD 3 for Playstation 3

Culling the Battlefield: Data Oriented Design in Practice

Lighting you up in Battlefield 3

Colin Barre-Brisebois - GDC 2011 - Approximating Translucency for a Fast, Cheap and Convincing Subsurface-Scattering Look

5 Challenges Feedback

Thanks again to everyone that contributed feedback to my 5 Challenges in Interactive Rendering talk in the Beyond Programmable Shading course! Had a lot of fun discussions and pretty much all of the feedback fit nicely into the selected challenges and topics.

Feels great that we as an industry are not completely trying to go in different directions and actually seem to care the most about many of the same topics. If you don't agree, please leave a comment :)

Will follow up with some of you that sent long detailed emails of your inner wishes & secrets next week now that I'm back from Siggraph.


Here is a list of everyone (I hope!) that directly gave feedback on what the challenges should be or topics of interests, thanks! This is a great list of people to follow on twitter as well.

Christina Coffin (@christinacoffin)
Colin Barré-Brisebois (@ZigguratVertigo)
Daniel Collin (@daniel_collin)
Flavius Alecu (@flawe)
Sander van Rossen (@logicalerror)
Rob Jones (@bobvodka)
Steven Tovey (@nonchaotic)
Colin Riley (@domipheus)
Joe Tidmarsh (@mrjovis)
Stephen Hill (@self_shadow)
Federico Bianco Prevot (@nocturndragon)
Stefan Boberg (@bionicbeagle)
Noel Llopis (@snappytouch)
Björn Knafla (@bjoernknafla)
Andrew Richards (@codeandrew)
Juan Manuel Alvarez (@the_naicigam)
David Luebke (@davedotluebke)
Jonathan Ragan-Kelley (@jrk)
Pat Wilson (@pat_wilson)
Rachel Blum (@groby)
Brian Karis (@briankaris)
Matt Collins (@matt_c_)
Sam Martin (@palgorithm)
Aaron Lefohn
Andrew Lauritzen
Luca Fascione
Steve Anichini
Simon Taylor
Matt Swoboda
Cody Ritchie
Mattias Kylen
Oscar Carlén


Oh and if you still have thoughts about what the 5 major challenges are and/or didn't have time to discuss it before, please do send a tweet (@repi), post a comment or send an email. Always interesting to discuss & hear people's thoughts and ideas on the topic!

See you, if not sooner, at GDC 2011 (San Francisco) and SIGGRAPH 2011 (Vancouver).

SIGGRAPH 2010 talks by DICE

SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles was great! Lots of good real-time talks & research this year as well as a huge amount of old friends & new people to meet up with and talk to.

Many of the courses now also have course sites set up for them now the material for the talks can be found, highly recommended reading:

• Advances in Real-time Rendering


• Beyond Programmable Shading ("my" course)


• Physically Based Shading Models in Film and Game Production


• Stylized Rendering in Games

We had a big presence at SIGGRAPH this year and all the DICE talks, except for the Mirror's Edge one, can now be found on both publications.dice.se (including the .ppt files for them) as well as embedded in this post.

Hope to upload the Mirror's Edge talk by Henrik Halén from the Stylized Rendering in Games course later on, we need to sort out some permissions for that one first.

Here are the slides for 5 of the 6 DICE talks at SIGGRAPH 2010 embedded:

5 Major Challenges in Interactive Rendering

Bending the Graphics Pipeline

Destruction Masking in Frostbite 2 using Volume Distance Fields

A Real-time Radiosity Architecture

Stylized Rendering in Battlefield Heroes