I’ve been enamored with graphics technology since I bought an Apple II computer in college and started playing games on it. It was only natural that SIGGRAPH (ACM’s Special Interest Group for GRAPHics) would become my favorite industry event. The fun thing about SIGGRAPH is that it lets you peer into the future. This is the event to attend if you want to see what’s brewing in graphics research labs around the world. Graphics techniques developed in academic labs quickly get incorporated into commercial rendering systems, and you see the results in next year’s films. The techniques get refined further, to create real-time implementations, and then get incorporated into game engines a year or two later, maybe less. It used to take several years for the progression from academic research to film rendering techniques to inclusion in games. But now it seems like this progression occurs in months instead of years.
Graphics hardware now comprises as much as three-fourths of the die on some Intel processors, so it is only natural that SIGGRAPH has also become a favorite industry event for our graphics technology team. We’re doing a bunch of things at SIGGRAPH again this year and you can get the whole SIGGRAPH schedule on our website.
This year’s SIGGRAPH conference will include more game developer material than I’ve seen in my 32 years of attending. Of course the highlight of SIGGRAPH is the technical paper presentations, and Intel will be presenting contributions this year with papers entitled Layered Light-Field Reconstruction for Defocus Blur and Single-View Reconstruction via Joint Analysis of Image and Shape Collections. Our booth will be front and center (South Hall, both 701) and we’ll be doing 11 demos, including hot-off the press implementations of the latest DirectX*, Vulkan* and OpenGL ES* APIs on Intel® Graphics; hardware technology demos showing how Thunderbolt increases productivity of 4K workflows; results from research that include real light capture and editing for visual effects; demos from key Intel partners including Epic, Autodesk, and Wacom; and a new Photoshop plugin that we are building to increase quality and performance of texture compression on Intel hardware platforms.
We will be conducting a series of talks in Concourse Hall, Room 406B from Tuesday through Thursday. If you want to hear about all that Intel has to offer at SIGGRAPH, come to our Intel® Fast Forward talk at noon on Tuesday. That talk covers everything we’re doing at SIGGRAPH and will be followed by talks on using SIMD for skin deformation (with DreamWorks Animation); the OSPRay ray tracing framework; the Embree ray tracing library; matrix math (with DreamWorks Animation); Thunderbolt™ 3 technology; optimizing Pixar’s OpenSubdiv library; and light capture and rendering for virtual production. These talks are repeated a couple of different times in order to let you fit them into your schedule at SIGGRAPH.
We are also teaming with Waskul.tv again this year to offer a variety of interesting, live-streamed video interviews with industry figures from academia and industry. Get the latest schedule here and swing by the South Hall lobby to listen to interviews in progress Monday through Thursday of SIGGRAPH. Interviews will also be posted on Waskul.tv for viewing after SIGGRAPH.
We are also organizing a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session for technical artists. This meet-up will occure in Room 504 on Wednesday from 3:30-4:30 pm. Come and check it out and give us some ideas about how Intel can improve its products for the content creation segment.
In conjunction with SIGGRAPH, we’ve also released a couple additional source code samples for Android game developers. One sample shows you how to use Intel® INDE GPA to improve the performance of your Android* game. A second shows you how to add support for Adaptive Volumetric Shadow Maps (aka really cool smoke!) to your Android game. We’ve also just published a great new tutorial on rasterizer order views. Check it out! From the newsroom: we’ve just announced the next-gen enthusiast desktop PC and, in some outstanding news for content creators, we’ve announced that the first Intel® Xeon® processors are coming to notebooks this fall.
Once again, for all of the Intel activities at SIGGRAPH 2015, see our online event schedule, follow us on the web, twitter (@IntelSoftware, @RandiAtIntel, #Intelgamedev), or Facebook. Hope to see you in L.A.!
Image from Vladlen Koltun’s paper, Single-View Reconstruction via Joint Analysis of Image and Shape Collections
DreamWorks Animation/Intel Tech Talk
Before (top) and after (bottom) images demonstrated high-quality, accelerated texture compression using Intel’s texture compression Photoshop plugin.