Attend GDC 2017 for a behind-the-scenes look at Titanfall 2's textures

Organizers of the 2017 Game Developers Conference are working hard to put together a bunch of great content, and given that registration is open for the show -- the world's premier event for game developers -- they wanted to quickly highlight one of the great talks already lined up.

Respawn Entertainment's mech-enhanced shooter Titanfall 2 just came out, and at GDC Respawn's own Chad Barb will be breaking down the stunning game's rendering tech in his talk on "Efficient Texture Streaming in Titanfall 2."

According to Barb, Respawn faced a tricky challenge: In developing Titanfall 2, the studio wanted more detailed environments, but also a lot more options for player weapons, equipment and titans.

One key was adding real-time texture streaming to their engine. However, with little GPU or CPU to spare, they needed an approach that could rely on offline processing. It had to allow artists the freedom to create textures at whatever resolution they want, without having to do much manual setup or tweaking. Finally, for PC, Respawn's team had to work with different amounts of RAM and display resolutions.

Thus, Barb's talk will go into depth about Respawn's approach, including their preprocess, how they stream in precomputed data to drive their streaming, their pipeline, how they use histograms to prioritize textures to load or drop, as well as useful tools and lessons learned. 

This talk could be interesting to all, and would be ideal for someone implementing their own texture streaming system, or someone who is interested in the practical issues or details of such a system in a large-scale game.

And there's lots more to come! Conference officials look forward to announcing more GDC 2017 sessions spanning a diverse array of game industry issues in the months ahead. For now, don't miss the opportunity to save money by registering early -- the deadline to register for passes at a discounted rate is January 25, 2017. GDC 2017 itself will take place February 27th - March 3rd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

For more information on GDC 2017, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

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