REAC 2024 took place on June 3rd/4th, online, 8am to 12am PT.
Thank you for making this year a success (yet again)! We had more than two thousands registrants, and every day hundreds of people came to attend the live event, with a concurrent peak of seven hundreds, but even most importantly, almost everyone who came to saw the conference live stayed glued to the screen for all the presentations, and we had an amazing number of discussion threads on our community Discord!
Schedule
Monday June 3rd, 2024
08:00PT Introduction. Stephen McAuley, Angelo Pesce, Natalya Tatarchuk, Michael Vance
This presentation is a walk through of making a technical design to handle geometric complexity of Alan Wake 2. Our previous games have been relatively simple in terms of geometry, so making a game that takes place in a primordial forest with open vistas required us to rethink how to address geometry rendering.
The talk is focused to give an insight of why certain techniques were selected and to what kind of implementation these decisions led us to. Intention is not to give a perfect recipe of how geometry rendering should be implemented but to explain a way that was relatively simple and catered what was needed to achieve artistic vision of Alan Wake 2.
Speaker: Tatu Aalto is lead graphics programmer at Remedy Entertainment. He has been working in the games industry since 2003 and has a background in real-time graphics and software rasterization before that.
Tatu has spent most of his industry career on building rendering technology and has given talks about computer graphics in various conferences.
Resource Management Architecture in 4A Engine.
The talk gives an overview and implementation details of resources management and streaming architecture in the next iteration of 4A Engine. Many architectural changes in the engine were designed around ray-tracing as a first class citizen and induced some uncommon challenges of BVH streaming, persistent scene representation, etc. Addressing those challenges required usage of relatively new and not widely-adopted functionality of GPU feedback streaming, bindless resources, and more.
This talk starts with the discussion about new resources and binding models in the 4A Engine as well as memory management associated with them. Then, it will follow-up with the streaming approach for geometry (including BVH) and textures which relies on GPU feedback information. Finally, we'll share some information about performance implications of discussed solutions and advanced debugging toolkits developed for and on top of the new resource model (including live GPU debugging, logging, asserts, breakpoints, etc.)
Speaker: Oleksandr Drazhevskyi is a Technical Director at 4A Games working on in-house 4A Engine and the next instalment of the Metro series. Before joining 4A Games he worked as Technical Architect at Ubisoft Entertainment helping to ship games such as Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs, Trials, and few other franchises as well as helping to shape architecture of some of the Ubisoft's internal engines. His main areas of interests include: offline and run-time rendering, engines architecture, hardware and performance, computation models, and few others.
Maya as Editor: The game development approach of Santa Monica Studio.
Historically, many game studios have used Maya as a game editor. This is particularly prevalent amongst first party studios, where console targets take precedence over PC versions of the engine. Santa Monica Studio, the developers of the God of War franchise, are one such studio that started and has continued with this approach. We will discuss how game content at Santa Monica Studio is authored in Maya, and how that influences the architecture of the engine and the build pipeline. We will also discuss how this influences studio culture in general, and other tools developed such as the material editor. We conclude with the challenges this approach has presented us with and a path forward for the future, including our move to OpenUSD.
Speakers: Stephen McAuley started in video games in 2006 at Bizarre Creations before moving to Ubisoft in 2011, where he spearheaded the graphical vision on the Far Cry brand. In 2020, he joined Sony Santa Monica as a Lead Rendering Engineer and is now Technical Director. He focuses on physically based lighting and shading, data-driven rendering architecture and overall improvements in visual quality. He is also passionate about sharing his knowledge with the industry as a whole, running internal and external training and conferences.
Matt Pettineo (mastodon, twitter, github) is the Lead Rendering Programmer at Sony Santa Monica Studio, and has been a rendering and engine programmer in the games industry for nearly 15 years. Previously he was Lead Engine Programmer at Ready At Dawn Studios, where he worked on The Order: 1886 and the Lone Echo series of games. Matt's interests and contributions span a wide range of topics, including physically based shading/materials, rendering APIs and abstractions, low-level platform optimization, and general engine architecture. Matt also maintains a personal blog called "The Danger Zone" which hosts many articles about graphics programming topics and open source demos that are hosted on GitHub.
Ray Tracing in Diablo IV.
Real-time ray tracing is still a relatively new technology, but has seen rapid adoption across the landscape of engines in the games industry. Every engine is different, and so the inclusion of ray tracing will look different in each setting. However, some best practices and even decision points will be similar among them. In this talk, Kevin will examine the process of integrating ray tracing into Diablo IV, from the decision making process to define the feature set, to the implementation and how it was shaped by the existing architecture of the game engine. He'll dive into the details of what makes ray tracing tick in Sanctuary, and then reflect on what worked – and what didn't – as the feature made its way into the hands of players.
Speaker: Kevin Todisco is a Principal Software Engineer at Blizzard Entertainment on the Diablo franchise. Beginning his career with Vicarious Visions, he has over a decade of experience in graphics technology for games and has worked on franchises such as Skylanders, Guitar Hero, Crash Bandicoot, and Destiny. He led the team that created a bespoke rendering engine for Diablo II: Resurrected before transitioning to a role on the Diablo IV team.
Testing Rendering Code at Frostbite.
The Frostbite team maintains a big game engine codebase, with hundreds of engineers working on it every day. To maintain stability and ensure we don't break our games, Frostbite invests a lot of effort in automated testing and tooling around it. In the context of rendering, hardware differences between platforms and GPU vendors make testing particularly challenging.
In this talk we'll see the different kinds of automated tests Frostbite uses, the tooling we have built for this, and how that applies specifically to developing and maintaining a big rendering engine.
Speaker: Jon Valdés (mastodon) has been working in the Frostbite Rendering team in Stockholm for the last 8 years, where he's worked on multiple titles in franchises like Need For Speed, Battlefield, and FC. As part of this, he has focused mainly on global illumination, post-processing, strand hair, and multiple pieces of internal tooling.
Optimizing the UI’s CPU bound frame rate in Call of Duty.
This talk takes a deep dive into the system that drives the user interface and HUD of Call of Duty. Over the years the Call of Duty UI performance had atrophied and gotten into a state where it was impacting the frame rate of the entire game - and even risking the launch of the title. This is the story of the battle that was fought to both reclaim the lost knowledge of our UI engine while getting the performance back to a suitable state for the release of Call of Duty.
Speaker: Simon Eschbach has somehow shipped 10 games while ending up in the same place every time: Detangling, debugging and optimizing long neglected user interface systems. His work started 20 years ago on the original BioShock games and ended up spanning several genres to finally end up back in the frame rate critical FPS space on Call of Duty. After being on the CPU performance critical path for the last three Call of Duty titles, Simon is ready to share his war stories from the trenches.
Tatu Aalto is lead graphics programmer at Remedy Entertainment. He has been working in the games industry since 2003 and has a background in real-time graphics and software rasterization before that.
Oleksandr Drazhevskyi is a Technical Director at 4A Games working on in-house 4A Engine and the next instalment of the Metro series. Before joining 4A Games he worked as Technical Architect at Ubisoft Entertainment helping to ship games such as Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs, Trials, and few other franchises as well as helping to shape architecture of some of the Ubisoft's internal engines. His main areas of interests include: offline and run-time rendering, engines architecture, hardware and performance, computation models, and few others.
Stephen McAuley started in video games in 2006 at Bizarre Creations before moving to Ubisoft in 2011, where he spearheaded the graphical vision on the Far Cry brand. In 2020, he joined Sony Santa Monica as a Lead Rendering Engineer and is now Technical Director. He focuses on physically based lighting and shading, data-driven rendering architecture and overall improvements in visual quality. He is also passionate about sharing his knowledge with the industry as a whole, running internal and external training and conferences.
Matt Pettineo (
Kevin Todisco is a Principal Software Engineer at Blizzard Entertainment on the Diablo franchise. Beginning his career with Vicarious Visions, he has over a decade of experience in graphics technology for games and has worked on franchises such as Skylanders, Guitar Hero, Crash Bandicoot, and Destiny. He led the team that created a bespoke rendering engine for Diablo II: Resurrected before transitioning to a role on the Diablo IV team.
Jon Valdés (
Simon Eschbach has somehow shipped 10 games while ending up in the same place every time: Detangling, debugging and optimizing long neglected user interface systems. His work started 20 years ago on the original BioShock games and ended up spanning several genres to finally end up back in the frame rate critical FPS space on Call of Duty. After being on the CPU performance critical path for the last three Call of Duty titles, Simon is ready to share his war stories from the trenches.