Game development presentations - a useful reference

Getting Started with Mesh Shaders in Diligent Engine
September 23, 2020

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5280217/Getting-Started-with-Mesh-Shaders-in-Diligent-Engi

 

Have we gotten anything on what mesh shaders bring performance wise over the existing geometry pipeline?

 

There were some early results on coding video blog of Niagara.


Ability to have fine grained culling and creation/instacing of objects should be quite nice.
Also getting completely rid of DX11 like tessellation should be nice. (Bypassing amplification limits etc.)

 

Wizardry.

 

Scaling Probe-Based Real-Time Dynamic Global Illumination for Production
Nice.

 

Segment tracing for faster implicit surface rendering

 

Awesome presentation on collision system in Witness.

 

Noita just left early access. If we're expecting more destruction and physics in next gen games, this is an interesting game design study of taking those to the extreme (in 2d).

 

Raytraced Shadows in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

 

Good read. Even "simple" raytracing use cases like shadows require a lot of thoughtful tuning to hit the right balance of IQ and performance.

This bit was interesting. It seems most raytracing implementations are using static low poly versions of scene geometry which is at odds with the much higher (and dynamic) poly counts enabled by mesh shaders and DX12.

 

I despise "alpha transparency" geometry (leaves, grass) so it amuses me how using real geometry might be a performance gain.

There was nothing about shadow casting particle effects (e.g. smoke).

Building acceleration structures looks like a major gotcha. I suppose the consoles are well equipped there...

 

Ray traces shadows in call of duty modern warfare. Next year it will be more interesting as would the different hardwares require different approaches for optimizing performance? It's already pretty interesting how much creativity is used in generating the BVH acceleration structures.

 

Embark (lots of ex-DICE devs) have posted the rust-gpu on github (https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu). Pretty interesting!

 

Well, that is not surprising given the insane scope they chose for their game. Yet, my comment comes from my disapointment at how slowly the industry feels to be embracing procedural and machine synthesized animation. Emphasis on the word "feels". Research on this area is probably hard and discouraging (full of dead-ends and not-good enoughs) so the progress is not as visible from my armchair as my spoiled ass would like.

 

In Horizon Wero dawn, some of the facial animation of minor character in side quest is procedural, Bioware use too procedural animation.



They use procedural placement in HZD for the scenery.

Same for building in Spiderman and tons of other game.

 

The Crunch Time discussion bits moved to a new thread: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/general-crunch-time-for-projects-spawn-2020.62085/

Thanks for providing post numbers where to start spawning.

 

Great twitter thread by sebbbi about signal distance field compression and heightmap compression

SDF:


Heigthmap:

 

Yup.

This is part of his work on new renderer and gives updates almost daily.
Should be very interesting allowing rendering of massive amounts of SDF geometry.

 

I miss his posts here. Did the noise to quality ratio drive him away?