NVIDIA at GDC 2006

Below are the names, speakers and descriptions for the sessions we'll be participating in at GDC 2006. Feel free to send us your comments and suggestions -- your feedback that will help shape the content of these and future sessions.
Attendees of our Sponsored Sessions on March 23rd will enter our raffle to win 7900 graphics cards.

Advanced Visual Effects with OpenGL [9:00am — 10:00am]
Simon Green, Mark Harris, Cass Everitt and Other Speakers from Industry

This day-long tutorial provides an in-depth look at how the latest technologies in OpenGL apply to game graphics. Following brief reviews of the recent changes to OpenGL and selected new extensions, their use in game development will be demonstrated and discussed. This includes detailed presentations of advanced visual effects and techniques for general purpose computation using OpenGL (GPGPU) from NVIDIA and other hardware vendors, as well as top developers. This tutorial also covers topics that game developers need to consider while implementing their engines, including performance tips, tools for shader development, and tools for debugging. Details

Khronos: Creating the Embedded Media Processing Ecosystem [3:00pm — 3:45pm]
Neil Trevett (Vice President Embedded Content, NVIDIA)

This presentation provides insights into Khronos' rapidly forming ecosystem of open standards for embedded graphics and media processing, including: key market drivers, the role of the Khronos Group, and an overview of how 3D and media processors are beginning to ship into the mobile market place. The presentation also covers the key features and roadmap of the main Khronos standards: the OpenGL ES 3D API including the newly announced OpenGL ES 2.0; the new OpenVG standard for accelerated high-quality 2D vector graphics; OpenSL ES for foundation-level audio processing; OpenMAX for video and image processing; and COLLADA for streamlined 3D content authoring. Details

Direct3D Day [10:00am — 6:00pm]
Cem Cebenoyan, Peter Young, Kevin Myers, Jeffrey Kiel, Bryan Dudash, Yuri Uralsky and Other Speakers from Industry

Brought to you with the collaboration of the industry's leading hardware and software vendors, this day-long tutorial provides an in-depth look at Direct3D technologies and how they can be applied to cutting-edge game graphics. Advanced techniques using the Direct3D API are presented, and a variety of special effects applicable to game content are discussed and demonstrated, with a special focus on usability in real game scenarios.  Details

Graphics Rendering With OpenGL ES [10:00am — 6:00pm]
Neil Trevett

Brought to you with the collaboration of the industry's leading OpenGL ES hardware and software vendors, this day-long tutorial provides an in-depth look at the latest technologies in OpenGL ES and how they can be applied to cutting-edge game graphics. The tutorial includes detailed descriptions of the latest features of OpenGL ES 2.0 and the latest extensions, followed by several case-studies of rendering effects that are enabled by these features. The tutorial also focuses on optimizing shaders and applications for maximum interactive performance. Special attention will be given to the unique performance and design requirements of embedded applications. Details

NVIDIA Mobile Performance Tools and GPU Performance Tuning
[9:00am — 10:00am, Room A8]
Lars Bishop

The mobile 3D landscape is changing rapidly. Extracting maximum performance from these tiny but powerful devices is critical to achieving a quality interactive experience. NVIDIA’s Mobile Developer Technology Engineers will discuss methods for streamlining content and code pipelines. In addition, NVIDIA will demonstrate a powerful, new handheld GPU development tool. Details

OpenGL ES Content Development Post-Mortem on NVIDIA GPUs
[10:30am — 11:30am, Room A8]
Lars Bishop

NVIDIA's Handheld Developer Technology Engineers and leading mobile studio Denied Reality will review successes and lessons learned while developing an OpenGL ES game demo. They will focus on how they succeeded in creating high-impact visual effects for the small screen, and how they maximized performance on the GoForce Handheld GPU. Details

GPU Performance Tuning with NVIDIA Performance Tools
[12:00pm — 1:00pm, Room A8]
Jeffrey Kiel, Sim Dietrich, Derek Cornish 

This talk showcases the latest suite of GPU performance analysis tools from NVIDIA, including NVPerfHUD 4, NVShaderPerf 2, and NVPerfSDK. Learn how you can find and remove bottlenecks with new features like NVPerfHUD 4's automated performance analysis. In addition, NVPerfSDK exposes detailed GPU performance counters in both OpenGL and DirectX. Details

Cross-Platform Shader Development with FX Composer 2
[2:30pm — 3:30pm, Room A8]
Christopher Maughan, Kevin Bjorke

Now supporting both OpenGL and DirectX, FX Composer 2 provides a state-of-the-art integrated development environment for shader authoring in Cg and HLSL through COLLADA FX. Attendees will learn all about FX Composer 2's features, including shader profiling support, artist-friendly tweakables, scripting support, custom plug-in architecture, and much more. Details

Variance Shadow Maps
[4:00pm — 5:00pm, Room A8]
Andrew Lauritzen / RapidMind

Shadow maps are a widely used shadowing technique in real time graphics. One major drawback of their use is that they cannot be filtered in the same way as color textures, typically leading to severe aliasing. Variance Shadow Maps is an algorithm that approximates the occlusion, and solves the problem of shadow map aliasing with minimal additional storage and computation.

Physics Simulation on NVIDIA GPUs
[5:30pm — 6:30pm, Room A8]
Simon Green, Mark Harris

Havok FX leverages state of the art software and hardware technology from NVIDIA to extend the capabilities of NVIDIA GPUs and SLI multi-GPU systems to include physics processing for massive real-time effects. In this presentation NVIDIA and Havok engineers will describe how Havok FX utilizes NVIDIA technology to simulate and render thousands of particles and rigid bodies in games. Live real-time demos will demonstrate the high performance available with current GPUs and provide a look into the future of physics processing on NVIDIA GPUs.

When Shaders and Textures Collide [12:00pm — 1:00pm]
Kevin Bjorke

Balanced and expressive use of both texturing and shading are key for the creation of new games, and are one of the few ways to increase visual richness in a CPU-bound environment. This presentation provides texture painters, artists, and programmers key insights on how their tasks interact. The result is that artists better understand what does and doesn't work best with shading while shader writers understand how to provide optimal controls and visual power to the artists who use their shaders, along with ideas and tools for both kinds of game-creators to better understand the power inherent in modern shading. Attendees are exposed to novel shading algorithms, innovative use of texturing, and real-world production examples that show how existing artwork can be supercharged through savvy shading.  Details