GDC 2009

I have to say that I've never been a huge fan of the Game Developers Conference. It's massively over-priced (if you're unfortunate enough to have to pay), often poorly organized, and the quality of the technical presentations (including my own) is variable at best. It ain't no Siggraph, that's for sure. At least they moved it from the incredibly dull San Jose to San Francisco, where they have such luxuries as bars that stay open past 10pm. GDC's only saving grace is that everyone in the games industry goes there, so it's a great place to network and meet people (read: find a new job). All that said, I'll be there this year, and there are a few talks that look interesting: Advanced Visual Effects with Direct3D for PC - learn about the latest developments in Direct3D, and see AMD and NVIDIA make snide digs at each other under their breath. Math for Programmers/Physics for Programmers - these guys know their physics. Takahiro Harada (who shares my love of simulating colliding balls and now works at Havok) and Erwin Coumans (of Bullet fame) will be talking about implementing rigid body physics on CUDA/OpenCL, Cell SPU and Larrabee, which should be interesting (especially given how different these 3 architectures are). Mixed Resolution Rendering - sounds like Jeremy is really into cross-bilateral filtering. Rasterization on Larrabee: A First Look at the Larrabee New Instructions (LRBni) in Action - apparently Intel have some kind of new CPU that's meant to do graphics and this talk is about some new variant of MMX it has. Michael Abrash is something of a legend and always an entertaining speaker. The Rendering Technology of KILLZONE 2 - this game looks great, and it's always interesting to hear from developers who have managed to get the PS3 to do something impressive. Anyway, I should probably do some work now, see you there!