The 2023 conference was an online-only event happening from Monday June 5th to Tuesday June 6th.
This year the course included speakers from the makers of several innovative rendering engines, such as HypeHype, Activision, and Unity Technologies Wētā Digital, amongst others. The course addressed a variety of topics relevant to the practitioners of real-time rendering architecture in games and other real-time 3D applications. The topics covered diverse subjects such as performant mobile rendering architecture for open worlds, modern Vulkan renderers, and renders, both offline and real-time, for film productions like Avatar 2: Way of Water.
Schedule
Monday June 5th, 2023
08:00PT Introduction, Stephen McAuley, Angelo Pesce, Natalya Tatarchuk, Michael Vance
08:15PT Modern Mobile Rendering @ HypeHype, Sebastian Aaltonen
09:15PT Break
09:30PT Task Graph Renderer at Activision, Charlie Birtwistle, Francois Durand
10:30PT Break
10:45PT Scripting Language? Engine Language? Why Not Both?, Wouter van Oortmerssen
11:45PT Closing Remarks, Stephen McAuley, Angelo Pesce, Natalya Tatarchuk, Michael Vance
Tuesday June 6th:
08:00PT: Introduction, Stephen McAuley, Angelo Pesce, Natalya Tatarchuk, Michael Vance
08:15PT Lessons Learned from Establishing a Long Term Vision for Far Cry Dunia Engine’s Shader Pipeline, Cong Hao He, Jendrik Illner
09:15PT Break
09:30PT Overview of Nitrous’ Decoupled Rendering Architecture, Dan Baker
10:30PT Break
10:45PT Wētā Digital Rendering Architecture, Robert Cannell, Sander van der Steen
11:45PT Closing Remarks, Stephen McAuley, Angelo Pesce, Natalya Tatarchuk, Michael Vance
HypeHype’s new renderer has been designed from the ground up for Vulkan, Metal and TBDR mobile GPUs. Efficiency has been the key design principle. Most of the repeated work traditionally done at draw call frequency is gone. Pipelines and bind groups are precreated and data update is fully separated from drawing. Our command stream carries only the metadata. Simulation writes the actual data directly to persistently mapped GPU pointers, bypassing all data translation costs. This design allows us to hit stable 30 fps on low end Android phones in complex 10,000 draw call scenes.
This talk will discuss various renderer design choices, data layouts and optimization tricks and show how these affect the performance on ARM, Qualcomm, PowerVR and Apple GPUs.
Speaker: Sebastian Aaltonen has over 20 years of experience in graphics rendering technology. His main focus areas are engine architecture, low level rendering APIs, performance optimization and GPU compute. Sebastian was pioneering GPU-driven rendering development at Ubisoft and distance field ray-tracing at Second Order (Claybook). He was leading Unity’s DOTS rendering team until he joined HypeHype to rebuild their mobile rendering technology.
Task Graph Renderer at Activision
Render graphs have become an established way of handling the complexities of synchronization, memory allocation and scheduling for modern rendering engines. In this talk we’ll cover our task graph renderer, paying particular attention to the design of the engineer facing APIs, as well as some of the backend implementation details that allow us to scale our renderer from mobile all the way up to the 9th generation of consoles and beyond.
Speakers: Charlie Birtwistle is a Senior Principal Engineer at Activision Central Tech, where he works on the low-level rendering architecture and APIs that power Activision’s games. He started in the industry nearly 20 years ago working on launch titles for Xbox 360.
Francois Durand is a Technical Director at Beenox, an Activision studio. Having worked almost 15 years in the industry on franchises like The Amazing Spider-Man, Skylanders and Call of Duty, he now focuses on finding ways to improve graphics and engine scalability.
Scripting Language? Engine Language? Why Not Both?
This talk is about the intersection of game engines and programming languages - the speaker has spent his career building both, usually with one influencing the other extensively. We will start with an overview of past engine and language designs that may be interesting, then moving toward my latest engine where we see how the scripting language taking on a different role changes everything, mixed with other fun topics such as type inference, resource & memory management, performance, serialization, debugging, refactoring and.. raytracing?
Speaker: Wouter van Oortmerssen is the founder of VoxRay Games, that is building a “craft your own game world” game with FPS/RPG/Survival elements, brought to life with voxels and raytracing. Before that, he was at Google, working on his library FlatBuffers, game & VR tech, and WebAssembly/LLVM. He worked at a variety of game studios, such as CryTek (FarCry), EA (SimCity), Gearbox (Borderlands) as well as taught engine programming classes at a Masters degree program for video game development. He made the Open Source Cube Engine that did multiplayer voxel editing before it was cool. He designed more programming languages than should be legal, including some popular ones way back on the Amiga platform.
Lessons Learned from Establishing a Long Term Vision for Far Cry Dunia Engine’s Shader Pipeline
In this talk, the 3D programming team behind Far Cry 6 will discuss the challenges they faced while developing the game, specifically in establishing a long-term technology roadmap to handle major graphics API transitions and implementing a shader pipeline for the latest title in the franchise. The team will provide specific examples of the obstacles they encountered, such as balancing technology improvements with frequent title releases, maintaining compatibility, and managing the complexities of the shader pipeline.
The talk will also highlight the team’s solutions to these challenges, such as setting boundaries and demanding requirements for modernizing the rendering technologies over the years and multiple releases. It will include their tech roadmap methodology, as well as iterative development, and testing methodology. It will share the outcomes and results of their efforts, including the successful implementation of a solid shader pipeline architecture.
Overall, this talk offers valuable insights into the complex and nuanced process of developing video game technology and provides practical solutions for managing technology upgrades in challenging timelines and development cycles.
Speakers: Cong Hao He specializes in real-time system engineering. He joined the 3D graphics team behind Far Cry 6 to deliver a great visual experience for the players on consoles before moving to Ubisoft’s Anvil engine core tech team. Here, he is currently working on low level rendering system development as well as making improvements to engine architecture.
Jendrik Illner is a 3D graphics programmer who started his full-time game industry career as a Junior 3D Programmer in 2015 at Ubisoft and left as 3D Technical Lead in 2021. Before joining Sony Santa Monica Studio, he briefly worked at Electronic Arts on the Frostbite engine. Jendrik specializes in game engine architecture and GPU-driven rendering techniques. He runs a weekly roundup of graphics programming-related news.
Overview of Nitrous’ Decoupled Rendering Architecture
An in-depth overview of Nitrous Engine’s Generalized Decoupled Shading System, which shades objects before they are rastered. This system is a general purpose rendering solution that provides a complete alternative to deferred/forward rendering paradigms. The talk will dive into the specifics of how the system is implemented, the shading language we made for it, and some examples of what types of materials it enables.
Speaker: Dan Baker, Graphics architect, co-founder of Oxide Games. Dan began his career at Microsoft where he helped develop DX8, DX9, and DX10, and developed HLSL. He continued his career at Firaxis Games, working on such games as Civilization Revolution, Civilization V and X-Com, architecting Firaxis’ engine for Civilization V. He is one of the founders of Oxide Games, where he is the graphics architect for the Nitrous Engine, the first shipping DX12 engine used in Ashes of the Singularity, and also the engine for upcoming game Ara: History Untold published by Microsoft Xbox Game Studios.
Wētā Digital Rendering Architecture
In this talk we explore the architecture behind Wētā Digital’s inhouse offline renderer, Manuka, and how the real-time renderer Gazebo complements its design in Wētā’s VFX pipeline. We describe the history and decision making behind the architectures and the benefits this brings to Wētā’s VFX pipeline.
Speakers: Robert Cannell is a Lead Software Engineer at Wētā Digital working on Wētā’s real-time preview renderer Gazebo that works with many DCC applications to improve workflows and turnaround times within the Studio. Previously, he worked in games as a graphics and performance engineer for 15 years, working over multiple generations of console, PC and mobile as both a contractor and at PikPok.
Sander van der Steen is a principal engineer at Wētā Digital and lead of one of the teams responsible for the architecture of the in-house renderer, Manuka. Besides working in rendering, he has been pivotal in the development of a high performance computing framework originally for live puppet evaluation and now provides a general infrastructure for the studio. Prior to joining Wētā, he was a principal tools engineer at Guerrilla Games, working on the titles Horizon Zero Dawn and Killzone Shadowfall.