March is an important time of year for game developers, as that's when Game Developers Conference (GDC) takes place - the most important conference of the industry. This year's edition has been cancelled because of coronavirus pandemic, just like all other events, or rather postponed to a later date. But many companies prepared their talks anyway. Surely, they had to submit their talks long time ago, plus any preparation, internal technical and legal reviews... The time spent on this shouldn't be wasted. That's why many of them shared their talks online as videos and/or slides. Below, I try to gather links to these materials with a full list of titles, with special focus on programming talks.

GDC

They organized multi-day "Virtual Talks" event presented on Twitch, with replays now available to watch and slides accessible on their website.

GDC Videos @ Twitch

GDC 2020 Virtual Talks (agenda)

GDC Vault - GDC 2020 (slides)

Monday, March 16

The 'Kine' Postmortem

Storytelling with Verbs: Integrating Gameplay and Narrative

Intrinsically Motivated Teams: The Manager's Toolbox

From 'Assassin's Creed' to 'The Dark Eye': The Importance of Themes

Representing LGBT+ Characters in Games: Two Case Studies

The Sound of Anthem

Is Your Game Cross-Platform Ready?

Forgiveness Mechanics: Reading Minds for Responsive Gameplay

Experimental AI Lightning Talk: Hyper Realistic Artificial Voices for Games

Tuesday, March 17

What to Write So People Buy: Selling Your Game Without Feeling Sleazy

Failure Workshop: FutureGrind: How To Make A 6-Month Game In Only 4.5 Years

Stress-Free Game Development: Powering Up Your Studio With DevOps

Baked in Accessibility: How Features Were Approached in 'Borderlands 3'

Matchmaking for Engagement: Lessons from 'Halo 5'

Forget CPI: Dynamic Mobile Marketing

Integrating Sound Healing Methodologies Into Your Workflow

From 0-1000: A Test Driven Approach to Tools Development

Overcoming Creative Block on 'Super Crush KO'

When Film, Games, and Theatre Collide

Wednesday, March 18

Bringing Replays to 'World of Tanks: Mercenaries'

Developing and Running Neural Audio in Constrained Environments

Mental Health State of the Industry: Past, Present & Future

Empathizing with Steam: How People Shop for Your Game

Scaling to 10 Concurrent Users: Online Infrastructure as an Indie

Crafting A Tiny Open World: 'A Short Hike' Postmortem

Indie Soapbox: UI design is fun!

Don't Ship a Product, Ship Value: Start Your Minimum Viable Product With a Solution

Day of the Devs: GDC Edition Direct

Independent Games Festival & Game Developers Choice Awards

Thursday, March 19

Machine Learning for Optimal Matchmaking

Skill Progression, Visual Attention, and Efficiently Getting Good at Esports

Making Your Game Influencer Ready: A Marketing Wishlist for Developers

How to Run Your Own Career Fair on a Tiny Budget

Making a Healthy Social Impact in Commercial Games

'Forza' Monthly: Live Streaming a Franchise

Aesthetic Driven Development: Choosing Your Art Before Making a Game

Reading the Rules of 'Baba Is You'

Friday, March 20

Beyond Games as a Service with Live Ops

Kill the Hero, Save the (Narrative) World

'Void Bastards' Art Style Origin Story

Writing Tools Faster: Design Decisions to Accelerate Tool Development

Face-to-Parameter Translation via Neural Network Renderer

The Forest Paths Method for Accessible Narrative Design

'Gears 5' Real-Time Character Dynamics

Stop & Think: Teaching Players About Media Manipulation in 'Headliner'

Microsoft

They organized "DirectX Developer Day" where they announced DirectX 12 Ultimate - a fancy name for the updated Direc3D 12_2 with new major features including DXR (Ray Tracing), Variable Rate Shading, and Mesh Shaders.

DirectX Developer Blog

Microsoft DirectX 12 and Graphics Education @ YouTube

DirectX Developer Day 2020 #DXDevDay @ Mixer (talks as one long stream)

DXR 1.1 Inline Raytracing

Advanced Mesh Shaders

Reinventing the Geometry Pipeline: Mesh Shaders in DirectX 12

DirectX 12 Sampler Feedback

PIX on Windows

HLSL Compiler

NVIDIA

That's actually GPU Technology Conference (GTC) - a separate event. Their biggest announcement this month was probably DLSS 2.0.

NVIDIA GTC Sessions

RTX-Accelerated Hair Brought to Life with NVIDIA Iray

Material Interoperability Using MaterialX, Standard Surface, and MDL

The Future of GPU Raytracing

Visuals as a Service (VaaS): How Amazon and Others Create and Use Photoreal On-Demand Product Visuals with RTX Real-Time Raytracing and the Cloud

Next-Gen Rendering Technology at Pixar

New Features in OptiX 7

Production-Quality, Final-Frame Rendering on the GPU

Latest Advancements for Production Rendering with V-Ray GPU and Real-Time Raytracing with Project Lavina

Accelerated Light-Transport Simulation using Neural Networks

Bringing the Arnold Renderer to the GPU

Supercharging Adobe Dimension with RTX-Enabled GPU Raytracing

Sharing Physically Based Materials Between Renderers with MDL

Real-Time Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion of Complex Scenes using Spatial Hashing

I also found some other videos on Google:

DLSS - Image Reconstruction for Real-time Rendering with Deep Learning

NVIDIA Vulkan Features Update – including Vulkan 1.2 and Ray Tracing

3D Deep Learning in Function Space

Unleash Computer Vision at the Edge with Jetson Nano and Always AI

Optimized Image Classification on the Cheap

Cisco and Patriot One Technologies Bring Machine Learning Projects from Imagination to Realization (Presented by Cisco)

AI @ The Network Edge

Animation, Segmentation, and Statistical Modeling of Biological Cells Using Microscopy Imaging and GPU Compute

Improving CNN Performance with Spatial Context

Weakly Supervised Training to Achieve 99% Accuracy for Retail Asset Protection

Combating Problems Like Asteroid Detection, Climate Change, Security, and Disaster Recovery with GPU-Accelerated AI

Condensa: A Programming System for DNN Model Compression

AI/ML with vGPU on Openstack or RHV Using Kubernetes

CTR Inference Optimization on GPU

NVIDIA Tools to Train, Build, and Deploy Intelligent Vision Applications at the Edge

Leveraging NVIDIA’s Technology for the Ultimate Industrial Autonomous Transport Robot

How to Create Generalizable AI?

Isaac Sim 2020 Deep Dive

But somehow I can't find their full list with links to them anywhere on their website. More talks are accessible after free registration on the event website.

Intel

GDC 2020. A Repository for all Intel Technical Content prepared for GDC

Intel Software @ YouTube

Multi-Adapter with Integrated and Discrete GPUs

Optimizing World of Tanks*: from Laptops to High-End PCs

Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit and its Application to Games

Intel® ISPC in Unreal Engine 4: A Peek Behind the Curtain

Variable Rate Shading with Depth of Field

For the Alliance! World of Warcraft and Intel discuss an Optimized Azeroth

Intel® Open Image Denoise in Blender - GDC 2020

Variable Rate Shading Tier 1 with Microsoft DirectX* 12 from Theory to Practice

Does Your Game's Performance Spark Joy? Profiling with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers

Boost CPU performance with Intel® VTune Profiler

DeepMotion | Optimize CPU Performance with Intel VTune Profiler

Google

Google for Games Developer Summit 2020 @ YouTube (a collection of playlists)

Mobile Track

Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote

What's new in Android game development tools

What's new in Android graphics optimization tools

Android memory tools and best practices

Deliver higher quality games on more devices

Google Play Asset Delivery for games: Product deep dive and case studies

Protect your game's integrity on Google Play

Accelerate your business growth with leading ad strategies

Firebase games SDK news

Cloud Firestore for Game Developers

Clouds Track

Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote

Scaling globally with Game Servers and Agones (Google Games Dev Summit)

How to make multiplayer matchmaking easier and scalable with Open Match (Google Games Dev Summit)

Unity Game Simulation: Find the perfect balance with Unity and GCP (Google Games Dev Summit)

How Dragon Quest Walk handled millions of players using Cloud Spanner (Google Games Dev Summit)

Building gaming analytics online services with Google Cloud and Improbable (Google Games Dev Summit)

Stadia Track

Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote

Bringing Destiny to Stadia: A postmortem (Google Games Dev Summit)

Stadia Games & Entertainment presents: Creating for content creators (Google Games Dev Summit)

Empowering game developers with Stadia R&D (Google Games Dev Summit)

Stadia Games & Entertainment presents: Keys to a great game pitch (Google Games Dev Summit)

Supercharging discoverability with Stadia (Google Games Dev Summit)

Ubisoft

Ubisoft’s GDC 2020 Talks Online Now

Online Game Technology Summit: Start-And-Discard: A Unified Workflow for Development and Live

Finding Space for Sound: Environmental Acoustics

Game Server Performance

NPC Voice Design

Machine Learning Summit: Ragdoll Motion Matching

Machine Learning, Physics Simulation, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Squishy Bunnies

Khronos: I can't find any information about individual talks from them. There is only a note about GDC 2020 Live Streams pointing to GDC Twitch channel.

AMD: No information.

Sony: No information.

Consoles: Last but not least, March 2020 was also the time when the details of the upcoming new generation of consoles have been announced - Xbox Series S and PlayStation 5. You can easily find information about them by searching the Internet, so I won't recommend any links.

If you know about any more GDC 2020 or other important talks related to programming that have been released recently, please contact me or leave a comment below and I will add them!

Maybe there a positive side of this pandemic? With GDC taking place, developers had to pay $1000+ entrance fee for the event. They had to book a flight to California and a hotel in San Francisco, which was prohibitively expensive for many. They had to apply for ESTA or a vista to the US, which not everyone could get. And the talks eventually landed behind a paywall, scoring even more money to the organizers. Now we can educate ourselves for free from the safety and convenience of our offices and homes.

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