Brush up on advanced game graphics techniques at GDC 2018

Heads up, GDC attendees: The GDC 2018 Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial on Monday, March 19th, 2018 is going to be a fantastic opportunity for you to take a day-long deep dive into the nuts and bolts of rendering gorgeous graphics in games.

Brought to you as a collaboration of the industry's leading hardware and software vendors, this day-long tutorial provides professional insight on how to create cutting-edge game graphics on the PC platform.

Special emphasis is placed on advanced graphics techniques that use modern low-level APIs to produce stunning visuals and achieve speed-of-light performance on contemporary GPUs. These will be delivered by NVIDIA's and AMD's demo and developer technology teams as well as some of the top game developers who ship major games into the marketplace.

In addition to illustrating the details of rendering advanced real-time visual effects, this tutorial will cover a series of vendor-neutral optimizations that developers need to keep in mind when designing their engines and shaders.

For example, in the "Water Rendering in 'Far Cry 5'" session Ubisoft Toronto's Branislav Grujic joins AMD's Cristian Cutocheras on stage to break down Far Cry 5's (pictured) all-new water system, which applies to a number of new water materials that allow the artists to create realistic water-based physical features such as waterfalls and lakes.

This talk will share how different water systems can be composited, the ways in which performance is scaleable with the number of water pixels, and more, as well as some practical advice on general optimization.

And in a double-feature session on '"New Techniques for Accurate Real-Time Reflections" & "Memory Management in Vulkan and DX12"' you'll get two 30-minutes sessions -- one on an algorithm for rendering accurate reflections in real-time using new Microsoft graphics technology that will be announced at GDC, the other on the challenges that new explicit graphics APIs (Vulkan and Direct3D 12) create for game developers in terms of memory management.

Both talks are promising; in the first you'll learn how to implement this exciting technique in your own graphics engine, and in the second you will learn good practices and common patterns that you can apply in your code in order to use GPU memory efficiently, as well as more advanced tips and tricks related to the topic. Don't miss it!

If you have any interest in the discipline of technical art, you won't want to miss these sessions! For more details on them and all other announced talks head over to the online GDC 2018 Session Scheduler.

For more information about GDC 2018, which runs March 19th through the 23rd, visit the show's official website, and subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

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