Game Developer Conference -2015 was one of the nice experience for me; from the presentation on the latest technology under the hood of the game engines to meeting passionate people in the game industry was really interesting. I really liked the talks on new advancement in the field of computer graphics for computer games. Especially, I liked the talks on DirectX12 and NVIDIA talk on voxelization based graphics library VXGI for dynamic lighting feature in the game.
DirectX 12 features are not only advanced but it gives a lot flexibility and control to the programmers to write their own renderer and shaders as compared to the DirectX12. DirectX12 memory uses design is slightly different than the previous version which make it faster. On the other hand previous version of DirectX was not utilizing the complete GPU in a way that it was directing some of the operation to the GPUs and rest was directed to the CPUs; with DirectX12, this feature is been removed and most of the operations load is passed to the GPUs (if available) which makes the performance of the game much better.
NVIDIA voxelization graphics library VXGI for lighting was really advanced features for rendering. It gives the more clarity to the shadow of the images (nearly by 50—60%) using the technique. Although it has certain limitation on its uses but gives the more clarity, it also take less CPU and GPU usage and gives higher frame rate.
Apart from technical aspect of the GDC meet, I met few interesting people who are passionate about games and computer graphics. I met an Indie developer named Matt Rix. He explained how to decompile various libraries and engine packages and how they are helpful in making the better out of the decompiled code in the game. He was mainly focusing on the decompiling of the unity engine and discussed even it’s not illegal to have a decompiled source code for the engine. Another developer who seems interesting to me was from Google, Gus Class while attending the workshop on Unity development on Android using Google cardboard.
GDC-15 was good for me to know the industry people and new advancement in technologies. As far as internship opportunities were concerned, I didn’t found any at all. Most of them were looking for full time applicants. Moreover, being interest in computer graphics, I tried to talk at booth of NVIDIA but they were not taking any interns.
As advice is concerned, I have only one advice to upcoming students for C6, please take the full access pass, as most of the good talks and presentation are covered only in it.