GDC 2018 was a big show for NDIVIDA. We made some exciting announcements about new technologies, and made major updates to some of our most popular features. We reviewed the latest developments in deep learning for game developers, announced our new graphics debugger, and kicked off the public release of NVIDIA Highlights and ANSEL Photo Mode. Check out these great sessions!

Session Description : In this talk, we will present results from the real-time raytracing research done at SEED, a cross-disciplinary team working on cutting-edge, future graphics technologies and creative experiences at Electronic Arts. We will explain in detail several techniques from “PICA PICA”, a real-time raytracing experiment featuring a mini-game for self-learning AI agents in a procedurally-assembled world. The approaches presented here are intended to inspire developers and provide a glimpse of a future where real-time raytracing powers the creative experiences of tomorrow.

Session Description : In this talk, Frostbite Rendering will present the results of ongoing R&D being conducted on our high quality static light baking solution (Flux) to reach the goal of an interactive GI workflow for artists. We will describe the techniques we applied to migrate our lightmap renderer to GPU using DXR. Flux is used in Star Wars Battlefront II, FIFA and Madden.

Session Description : Voxel based lighting has been around for a few years, but very few games have actually used it so far. In this session, we’re going to discuss VXGI, the Nvidia’s voxel based lighting solution, and uncover some recent improvements that aim to make it more practical and useful even for VR games on present day graphics hardware. We will also discuss how simple, planar area lights can be efficiently implemented with a combination of voxel-based occlusion and analytic irradiance calculations.

Session Description : Marco Salvi will present a simple, but powerful extension to temporal anti-aliasing that combine anti-aliasing and super-resolution. The resulting algorithm, TSRAA, adds only a small runtime cost, is easier to integrate into a rendering engine than complex schemes like checkerboarding, and allows for flexible amounts of super-resolution.

Session Description : Morgan McGuire and Petrik Clarberg will discuss how real-time ray tracing unlocks dynamic global illumination and streamlines game development workflow. Nir Benty will discuss how these sea-changes affect the next version of Falcor, NVIDIA's open source R&D rendering framework.

Session Description : NVIDIA will show how RTX, DXR along with GameWorks, Ray Tracing can revolutionize gaming by significantly boosting the real-time rendering quality as well as accelerating the content creating process. In particular, NVIDIA will show state of the art real-time denoising technologies from GameWorks that will drastically bring down the cost of ray traced rendering of area light soft shadows, ambient occlusions, and glossy reflections so they become practical for real-time rendering. In addition NVIDIA will showcase how RTX and DXR can be used to conveniently implement offline light transport algorithms like path tracing in your game engine, and show the power of that for content creation process. Finally NVIDIA will also provide some tips and guideline for integrating DXR into your engine, and discuss open challenges.

Nvidia Physics: New Simulation Features Session Description: In this talk we will discuss new aspects and features developed for the NVIDIA simulation libraries. We will present a new rigid body solver and a new articulation system targeted at robotics, that offer improved overall accuracy and robustness. We will give an overview on the NVIDIA Blast destruction library and the corresponding Unreal plugin. Further we will present the new Unity plugin for the Flex particle-based simulation library. Speakers: Michelle Lu, Senior Software Engineer | Kier Storey, Devtech Manager | Simon Schirm, PhysX and FLEX Project Lead | Bryan Galdrikian, Blast Project Lead Slides

Using artificial intelligence to enhance your game 2 of 2 Session Description: Machine learning has revolutionized many important fields, ranging from computer vision and natural language processing to healthcare and robotics. In two sessions, Microsoft and NVIDIA will discuss how developers can embrace machine learning methods for graphics and gaming. We’ll cover both gaming use cases and applications for machine learning as well as how to best leverage recent GPU hardware for machine learning workloads. Speaker: Yury Uralsky Distinguished engineer, GPU Architecture | Stuart Schaefer, Partner Software Architect, Microsoft | Daniel Kennett, Microsoft Slides | Video

Deep Learning for Game Developers Session Description: Deep learning continues to find new applications in many domains relevant to game developers. In this talk, we will discuss research on some of the most interesting new ways to apply deep learning to problems such as content creation, graphics, text, and speech. This talk will give you a sense of the current capabilities of deep learning, as well as where the field is headed. Speaker: Bryan Catanzaro VP, Applied Deep Learning Research Slides | Video

Deep Learning for Animation and Content Creation Session Description: In this talk, the speakers examine tools and technologies that NVIDIA’s GameWorks team is building to leverage the power of Deep Learning for content creation. They demonstrate recent research into ways that Deep Learning networks can be used to generate realistic looking human animation, and talk about how to use GPUs for high performance runtime inferencing of networks in modern games. The talk also covers the latest work in applying deep learning to texture synthesis and super resolution (including video) using both cloud and client based approaches. Speakers: Gavriel State, Senior Director, System Software & Andrew Edelsten, Director, Developer Technologies (Deep Learning) Video

NVIDIA GameWorks Technologies in Final Fantasy XV, behind the scenes Session Description: Improving visual fidelity in modern games is a challenging task and Final Fantasy XV was not an exception. Doing this requires detailed analysis of the game engine to come up with a list of technologies which would naturally fit into existing content. The existing game was already very high fidelity. With all the resources and excellent cooperation from Square Enix Business Division 2 we were ready to take risks and tried to utilize every single piece from GameWorks to make the fantasy become a bit more real. Speakers: Masaya Takeshige, Senior Development Technology Engineer & Evgeny Makarov, Senior Developer Technology Engineer Slides | Video

Beyond performance; Introducing NVIDIA's new Graphics Debugger Session Description: In this session, the Developer Tools team at NVIDIA will present a powerful new tool for graphics debugging and profiling. We’ll demonstrate features like Pixel History, Events Viewer and Resource Viewer, as well as advanced profiling functionality like the Range Profiler. In addition, we’ll have some exciting new features to show that we hope will become an essential part of every programmers arsenal for debugging graphics applications. The key takeaway will be a strong understanding of our tools and how to make them an everyday part of your development process. Speakers: Aurelio Reis, Director of Graphics Developer Tools & Dan Price Engineering Manager, Graphics Developer Tools Slides | Video