SIGGRAPH 2009 Exhibitor Tech Talks

These are sponsored talks, which are specific to a single companies’ products.  Even so, they often have good information.  The complete list of exhibitor tech talks is here; NVIDIA is giving so many talks that it rates a separate page.

AMD has a talk called Next-Generation Graphics: The Hardware and the APIs which from the abstract, seems to be about AMD’s DirectX11-level hardware and how to access its features using OpenGL extensions.  NVIDIA has two talks about using CUDA for non-traditional graphics: Alternative Rendering Pipelines on NVIDIA CUDA and Efficient Ray Tracing on NVIDIA GPUs.  Although both talks discuss ray tracing, the first also discusses a CUDA implementation of the REYES algorithm (which powers Pixar‘s RenderMan).  I think REYES is far more interesting for real-time use than ray tracing; similar algorithms have dominated film rendering for many years (although ray tracing is slowly gaining).

Another interesting NVIDIA talk (3D Vision Technology – Develop, Design, Play in 3D Stereo) discusses stereo rendering.  This is an area that has had many false starts over the last ten years, but now it seems like it might actually make it into the mainstream, driven by stereo film content and advances in home television displays.

Although it is not strictly about real-time rendering, AMD’s GPU-Accelerated Production Rendering is part of an interesting trend where GPUs are used not for real-time rendering, but to accelerate offline rendering.  Some of the techniques used here may inform future high-quality real-time rendering.