Game development presentations - a useful reference

[Frenetic Pony]

That might be a god send. It means devs will experiment way more with different aproaches to dispaching ray-casts, binning them, reordering, different strucures... Perhaps some will try to mix triangles tracing with other primitives...

The consoles will end up being a lab for experimentation that will ultimatelly inform the next interations of PC HW RT.

There's an upcoming poster from a programmer at AMD that appears? to be that: https://sa2022.siggraph.org/en/presentation/?id=tcom_133&sess=sess150
"Combining GPU Tracing Methods within a Single Ray Query" and he later made a post saying used SDFs somehow.

 

[tEd]

There's an upcoming poster from a programmer at AMD that appears? to be that: https://sa2022.siggraph.org/en/presentation/?id=tcom_133&sess=sess150
"Combining GPU Tracing Methods within a Single Ray Query" and he later made a post saying used SDFs somehow.

https://gpuopen.com/download/publications/SA2022_DistanceFieldRT.pdf

 

[MfA]

According to Epic, traversal shaders have limitations on consoles:

-The BVH traversal on consoles is implemented as a regular compute shader and only AABB and triangle intersections are HW accelerated. Which means rays are not going to be reordered to improve coherence by the hardware.
-In complex scenes the difference in traversal iterations can be massive even between similar rays
-Shader might be just generating incoherent rays

I wonder if with direct access to intersection testing it would make sense to do a limited breadth first traversal for say a thousand rays from a common origin (a tile for primary rays, or originating near a common point for secondary) and between each AABB intersection test compact the work items into new workgroups with coherent branching. If an entire workgroup reaches a leaf node before other workgroups it's no longer a problem, though the extra memory traffic and cache pollution might be.

 

[JoeJ]

https://gpuopen.com/download/publications/SA2022_DistanceFieldRT.pdf

Related blog post about realtime SDF generation.
I thought that's impossible. : )
He mentions something like seperable JFA, which i had tried, but did not work for me. Well, luckily i only need it for offline stuff.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1577590023888723970.html

 

[chris1515]

Many videos about the creation of the Matrix Awakens demo

 

[Remij]

Looking forward to this hypothetical one in the future:

 

[jlippo]

Intel® Arc™ Graphics Developer Guide for Real-Time Ray Tracing in Games

 

[chris1515]

Unreal fest day one was yesterday

Today is Unreal fest day two, interesting presentation with crystal dynamics talking about going from a proprietary engine to Unreal Engine 5. It will begin later.

 

[chris1515]

For @JoeJ

https://gpuopen.com/download/publications/GPUOpen2022_FusedLOD.pdf

BVH and LOD

 

[JoeJ]

For @JoeJ

https://gpuopen.com/download/publications/GPUOpen2022_FusedLOD.pdf

BVH and LOD

Thx, saw it before and thought 'finally some guys start to arrive at the proper conclusions' : )

But now all i want to see is 'How the world of Scorn was made' :O
It reminds me on experimenting with splines and parametric patches decades ago. Seeing this game really makes me think i should go back to that.
I also tried some NURBS modellers for artworks, but i could not really befriend it.
So i really want to know how they made the content for this awesome game. They have to tell us... ;D

 

[chris1515]

I did not watch the full presentation about the reason Crystal Dynamics goes from a proprietary engine to UE 5 but this is very interesting. It is beginning around 5 hours and a half but it is great. It is a QA with 5 peoples of CD some on the technical side of the studio and other from the artists and technical artist side of the studio about changing from a proprietary engine to UE 5. This is the pro and con. It makes life easier for artists and the work for having the same tools and workflow into the proprietary engine was to much.

EDIT: They did not have virtual texture into the proprietary engine and all other tech like Nanite or virtual shadows, all this technology helps artist work too.

EDIT2: It was the third time, they evaluate go with Unreal Engine. And this time the UE tools, technical debt of the proprietary engine and the complexity to create a current gen consoles games made them make the switch.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Your words in their ears, but i guess this won't happen.
Cross platform is increasingly important, so the weakest platform holds the others back. No matter if we talk about performance or flexibility.
Hopefully i'm wrong...

Yes, my thoughts exactly. Experimentation is less likely versus the days of closed platforms and discrete markets. Where's the incentive to 'experiment' if the final results reduce your market to a third or a quarter? You'd need a product capable of standing out to make it worth it, or just do it for love.

Although, what is the cost to be a console dev? There are loads of really crap, small scale indie titles on PSN. If someone can bang out 8 no-sale Flappy Bird clones and get them on the store, the cost to work on PS5 can't be that high!

 

[milk]

Thx, saw it before and thought 'finally some guys start to arrive at the proper conclusions' : )

But now all i want to see is 'How the world of Scorn was made' :O
It reminds me on experimenting with splines and parametric patches decades ago. Seeing this game really makes me think i should go back to that.
I also tried some NURBS modellers for artworks, but i could not really befriend it.
So i really want to know how they made the content for this awesome game. They have to tell us... ;D

Have you seen the Advances in Real time rendering presentation on real time catmulk clark implemented in Unity? What were your thoughts on that one?

 

[milk]

Yes, my thoughts exactly. Experimentation is less likely versus the days of closed platforms and discrete markets. Where's the incentive to 'experiment' if the final results reduce your market to a third or a quarter? You'd need a product capable of standing out to make it worth it, or just do it for love.

Although, what is the cost to be a console dev? There are loads of really crap, small scale indie titles on PSN. If someone can bang out 8 no-sale Flappy Bird clones and get them on the store, the cost to work on PS5 can't be that high!

Both consoles have very similar AMD chips. Major devs will experiment with alternative RT aproaches to the traditional DXR one for consoles (most of the adressabel market) and on PC they will brute force it. This will become more and more necessary as the years go by, the bar gets raised, and the gap between the average PC GPU and consoles grows more.

 

[chris1515]

The opening of the Unreal Fest. They present the new functionality of Unreal engine 5.1

_ On the performance side they improved lumen quality and at the same time optimize it for 60 fps on consoles. And they improved TSR for 60 fps on consoles and reduced ghosting on translucency. Finally they improved performance of scene queries and simulation of rigid bodies on the Chaos improving the worst case scenario by up to 50%.
_ They added World offset position to Nanite but the most impressive addition is the Nanite foliage. Nanite support two sided material, alpha mask and Lumen gain support for two sided foliage shading. They show examples, this is very impressive very far ahead of current way to render foliage but they need to improve performance.
_ They added support for motion matching and ML deformers for muscle simulation.

 

[Jay]

Combining neural denoising and neural upsampling.

Temporally Stable Real-Time Joint Neural Denoising and Supersampling

Given noisy, low-resolution input, our network performs spatiotemporal filtering to produce denoised and antialiased output at twice the resolution.

www.intel.com

 

[Scott_Arm]

Don't know if this is already posted, but there's an Nvidia Shader Execution Reordering whitepaper

https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/gameworks/ser-whitepaper.pdf

 

[chris1515]

We create awe-inspiring worlds - Guerrilla

Guerrilla is one of Europe's leading game companies and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe. We started in 2003, and have pushed the boundaries of technical and artistic excellence in our games ever since.

www.guerrilla-games.com

Interesting presentation about the Jolt physics engine of HFW. It is open source and they said the performance is better than Havok and PhysX. They only give example of performance of PhysX but they were licensing Havok if I remember well and the Jolt Physics engine scale well until 16 cores above at 32 cores, the communication between CCX is a problem.

Welcome, and thanks everyone for coming!
When you multi thread your game code, there are global systems that game objects need to talk to. These systems are often protected by a mutex and this can cause stalls as multiple threads are waiting for the lock. At Guerrilla the physics engine was one of the major sources of lock contention.
See, most physics engines are good at simulating 1000s of objects, and they scale that work across many CPUs, but when it comes to integrating with game code, only one thread can touch them at a time.
In 2014 I started writing my own physics engine, Jolt Physics, in my spare time. In May last year, it had gotten to a point where it implemented everything that Horizon was using. I slapped a big #ifdef in our physics wrapper so that we could run both engines. Jolt Physics had been designed to overcome the lock contention, but, to my surprise, not only the waits were gone, but the performance was much better, it used less memory and the simulation quality was better too.
My name is Jorrit Rouwe, I’m lead of the Game Tech Team. I’ve worked at Guerrilla for approximately 21 years, starting at the very first demo of Killzone 1. Today I will be presenting you how I architected Jolt Physics for Horizon Forbidden West and got rid of those waits.

The powerpoint presentation:

https://d3d3g8mu99pzk9.cloudfront.net/JorritRouwe/ArchitectingJoltForHFW.pptx

And the code, the engine is open source:

GitHub - jrouwe/JoltPhysics: A multi core friendly rigid body physics and collision detection library. Written in C++. Suitable for games and VR applications. Used by Horizon Forbidden West.

A multi core friendly rigid body physics and collision detection library. Written in C++. Suitable for games and VR applications. Used by Horizon Forbidden West. - jrouwe/JoltPhysics

github.com

 

[tEd]

Performance Comparison of BVHs for GPU Ray Tracing

 

[Krteq]

Performance Comparison of BVHs for GPU Ray Tracing

Nice review of BVH algorithms, thx for link