Talks & Demos from Assembly 2009
I went to Assembly 2009 demoparty this year.
No demo submissions, but I did a seminar presentation about developing graphics technology for small games (PDF slides). Mostly on hardware statistics, GPU features, testing and stability:
However, the awesome talk was given by ReJ: low level iPhone (pre-3GS) rendering details (PDF slides). Inner workings of iPhone’s GPU, OpenGL ES drivers, command buffers, VFP assembly and so on. Bringing assembly back to the Assembly, yeah!
View on Vimeo.
If you’re going to watch some demos from Assembly 2009, make sure to see:
- Frameranger (1st place demo). Rocked the big screen! Seems somewhat unfinished though.
- The Golden Path (3rd place demo) – for something fresh. Also, a good way to disprove the saying that “the winners don’t take drugs” :)
- Muon Baryon (1st place 4 kilobyte intro) – that’s what kids do with sphere marching on the GPU these days.
Excellent presentation! The Assembly seminars are really excellent to watch. They touch upon subjects that ‘regular’ seminars tend to ignore, and they’re just fun, goshdarnit.
Great presentation. I resonated with absolutely everything you said about GL driver problems and how GPU companies generally ignore you in favour of the big games.
Something that seems to be broken on almost all platforms randomly from version to version is hardware generated mipmaps. Does Unity use that? We’ve tried to use it for years but as time goes on we seem to disable it on more and more systems (except nvidia who have only broken it once) because everyone else seems to screw it up.
That’s on GL again BTW, hardware generated mipmaps on DX have always been fine.
Yeah, we had a lot of trouble with GPU mipmap generation on GL as well. And with render targets in general (cubemap render targets, non power of two sizes, etc.). But we default to D3D9 on Windows, and I’m happy to forget those nightmares.
Nice talk! Read the slides the other day, but didn’t watch the video until today. As you said, it was short, but I think it was good and straight to the point. It’s good to see a feet-on-the-ground talk like yours :) Even though everyone would love to make the next crysis, just a few will. But fortunately today there’s more people to target!
Hum… patching the driver state, that’s gross :p
I’m a little surprised those MBX don’t have a path that does not copy any vertex data though. Or maybe they do, and it’s just that the driver did not bother using the feature.