This week I was at GDC in San-Francisco. SF was nice and the weather was constantly partially sunny and 60 degrees – my favorite type of weather.
The conference was fun and I got to learn a lot of new things. Primarily I went to talks about graphics programming and programming for virtual reality.
Most of the graphics talks were interesting, though a few were just recaps of ones I had gone to earlier. About half of the ones I went to were about getting the most out of DirectX12 and the other half were about new graphics techniques. The DirectX12 talks ended up giving a good overview of the new API and how to use it to get significant performance boosts. DirectX12 focuses a lot more on multithreaded building of command lists and such. This, along with the lower level access to memory management and pipeline state management bring the API much closer to how consoles handle rendering. If you’re going for sheer draw calls and optimize effectively DirectX12 can push up to 10x the number of draw calls that DirectX11 could.
I went to a few parties, but had a hard time finding any engineers to in general to talk to – let alone graphics engineers.
The show floor had a lot of virtual reality related devices and games. Most of the lines for the Crescent Bay demos were pretty long so I did not get to try it, but there were a lot of controller peripherals.