Thoughts
Let's get the biggest thing out of the way first. During the session breaks, more than one AMD representative had reservations about holding the Tech Day next year because of the low turnout for this year. As one of the only presentation runs AMD do in the UK for their game development and technology understanding efforts, it'd be disingenuous to can it for 2008. There's plenty to be learned from the day for UK-based game developers at all levels, so don't give up because of sub-par turnout.
Hopefully, it's clear from reading our summaries of the presentations -- D3D10 and multi-GPU from Richard and Nicolas, Bruce Dawson's profiling and performance talk and Justin's architecture and CPU-driven software talk -- that game development on the PC is at one of those nice technology and performance sweet spots that comes around every so often. The best D3D yet is shipping, graphics hardware is around to accelerate it and multi-core processors are in almost all modern shipping PCs. Quad-core on the desktop is about to explode.
If you're a keen developer of 3D graphics applications on the PC, you should be rubbing your hands at the thought of working with a reasonably clean and predictable API that lets you express your problem easier and more efficiently than ever before. You should also be happy that basic CPU performance is taking big leaps in terms of per-socket performance, and the first D3D10 hardware accelerators are enabling D3D10 development to go much faster.
The current D3D10 application stutters we're seeing, especially with the first wave of games that make use of it, should go away in due course. Nick's talk on how to use D3D10 is eye-opening in places, if you're getting to grips with it now, and Richard's talk should hopefully have motivated more developers to think about multi-GPU and D3D10-level hardware features as they build their applications. Those D3D10-level hardware features will get faster over time, and there's always the tessellator to start thinking about now, especially if you're looking towards DX11.
Any large API revision will always take time to get used to, especially one like D3D10 that ushers in some fairly large changes to the pipeline, and multi-GPU has joined multi-core CPU programming as topics with that "argh, more than one is too many to deal with!" gut reaction. The Develop Tech Day is designed to make that all a bit easier and less scary, with good advice (in our opinion; we'd love to hear comments from developers using the mentioned technologies in anger, especially D3D10) from the presenters and lots to take away and think about.
We should mention that one of the GPG's latest recruits, Holger Gruen, presented on the use of GPU PerfStudio and GPU Shader Analyser for GPU-level performance tuning and optimisation. We'd cover his presentation here but we're in the process of reviewing those tools for another piece, so we'll hold back for that. Holger, who is ex-Intel and is no stranger to getting his hands dirty with code, presented well on the tools, so we're somewhat remiss in not covering them.
So the high-level highlights from this year's day, then, in no particular order:
- Multi-GPU is going to be a big part of your development life on the PC in years to come, more so than now
- D3D10 works best if you think sensibly about the new pipe and improvements before deploying them
- Programmable primitive tesselation is coming in DX11, but you can try it now on R6-family GPUs
- D3D10 doesn't have full orthogonality, so be mindful of what works with what, despite the base spec
- Constant buffer management is the main reason early D3D10 apps are slow, use them properly
- Be sensible with GS geometry amp and streamout
- Profile often and well; be sure to remember file I/O when profiling
- Make public benchmarks available to let users profile your code for you
- Help Windows do the right thing with memory allocation and thread management in games
- Quad-core CPUs are going to become the norm in the averages gamer's desktop in fairly short order
Here's hoping the Tech Day returns in 2008, and if you didn't make it there this year, here's hoping that you get something from our summaries.
