Personally, I particularly liked the “Practical Morphological Anti-Aliasing on the GPU” talk. It’s good to see the technique take around 3.5 ms on an NVIDIA 295 GTX, and the author’s site has a lot of information (including code).

Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games

The first half, Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games I (Wednesday, 28 July, 9:00 AM – 12:15 PM, Room 515 AB) starts with a short introduction by Natalya Tatarchuk (Bungie), and continues with four 45 to 50-minute talks:

• Rendering techniques in Toy Story 3, by John Ownby, Christopher Hall and Robert Hall (Disney).
• A Real-Time Radiosity Architecture for Video Games, by Per Einarsson (DICE) and Sam Martin (Geomerics)
• Real-Time Order Independent Transparency and Indirect Illumination using Direct3D 11, by Jason Yang and Jay McKee (AMD)
• CryENGINE 3: Reaching the Speed of Light, by Anton Kaplayan (Crytek)

The second half, Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games II (Wednesday, 28 July, 2:00 PM – 5:15 PM, Room 515 AB) continues with five more talks (these are more variable in length, ranging from 25 to 50 minutes):

• Sample Distribution Shadow Maps, by Andrew Lauritzen (Intel)
• Adaptive Volumetric Shadow Maps, by Marco Salvi (Intel)
• Uncharted 2: Character Lighting and Shading, by John Hable (Naughty Dog)
• Destruction Masking in Frostbite 2 using Volume Distance Fields, by Robert Kihl (DICE)
• Water Flow in Portal 2, by Alex Vlachos (Valve)

And concludes with a short panel (Open Challenges for Rendering in Games and Future Directions) and Q&A session by all the course speakers.

Beyond Programmable Shading

The first half,  Beyond Programmable Shading I (Thursday, 29 July, 9:00 AM – 12:15 PM, Room 515 AB) includes seven 20-30 minute talks:

• Looking Back, Looking Forward, Why and How is Interactive Rendering Changing, by Mike Houston (AMD)
• Five Major Challenges in Interactive Rendering, by Johan Andersson (DICE)
• Running Code at a Teraflop: How a GPU Shader Core Works, by Kayvon Fatahalian (Stanford)
• Parallel Programming for Real-Time Graphics, by Aaron Lefohn (Intel)
• DirectCompute Use in Real-Time Rendering Products, by Chas. Boyd (Microsoft)
• Surveying Real-Time Beyond Programmable Shading Rendering Algorithms, by David Luebke (NVIDIA)
• Bending the Graphics Pipeline, by Johan Andersson (DICE)

The second half, Beyond Programmable Shading II (Thursday, 29 July, 2:00 PM – 5:15 PM, Room 515 AB) starts with a short “re-introduction” by Aaron Lefohn (Intel) continues with five 20-35 minute talks:

• Keeping Many Cores Busy: Scheduling the Graphics Pipeline, by Jonathan Ragan-Kelley (MIT)
• Evolving the Direct3D Pipeline for Real-Time Micropolygon Rendering, by Kayvon Fatahalian (Stanford)
• Decoupled Sampling for Real-Time Graphics Pipelines, by Jonathan Ragan-Kelley (MIT)
• Deferred Rendering for Current and Future Rendering Pipelines, by Andrew Lauritzen (Intel)
• PantaRay: A Case Study in GPU Ray-Tracing for Movies, by Luca Fascione (Weta) and Jacopo Pantaleoni (NVIDIA)

and closes with a 15-minute wrapup (What’s Next for Interactive Rendering Research?) by Mike Houston (AMD) followed by a 45-minute panel (What Role Will Fixed-Function Hardware Play in Future Graphics Architectures?) by all the course speakers Mike Houston, Kayvon Fatahalian, and Johan Andersson, joined by Steve Molnar (NVIDIA) and David Blythe (Intel) (thanks to Aaron Lefohn for the update).

Both of these courses look extremely strong, and I recommend them to any SIGGRAPH attendee interested in real-time rendering (I definitely plan to attend them!)

Four presentations by DICE is an unusually large number for a single game developer, but that isn’t the whole story; they are actually doing two additional presentations in the Stylized Rendering in Games course, for a total of six!

Stylized Rendering in Games

Covered games will include:

• Borderlands (presented by Gearbox cofounder and chief creative officer Brian Martel as well as VP of product development Aaron Thibault)

• Brink (presented by lead programmer Dean Calver)

• The 2008 Prince of Persia (presented by lead 3D programmer Jean-François St-Amour)

• Battlefield Heroes (presented by graphics engineer Henrik Halén)

• Mirror’s Edge (also presented by Henrik Halén).

• Monday Night Combat (presented by art director Chandana Ekanayake) – thanks to Morgan for the update!

Physically Based Shading Models in Film and Game Production

• I’ll be presenting the theoretical background, as well as technical, production, and creative lessons from the adoption of physically-based shaders at the Activision studios.

• Also on the game side, Yoshiharu Gotanda (president, R&D manager, and co-founder of tri-Ace) will talk about some of the fascinating work he has been doing with physically based shaders.

On the film production side:

• Adam Martinez is a computer graphics supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks whose film work includes the Matrix series and Superman Returns; his talk will focus on the use of physically based shaders in Alice in Wonderland.  Imageworks uses a ray-tracing renderer, unlike the micropolygon rasterization renderers used by most of the film industry; I look forward to hearing how this affects shading and lighting.

• Ben Snow is a visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic who has done VFX work on numerous films (many of them as CG or VFX supervisor) including Star Trek: Generations, Twister, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, The Mummy, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, King Kong, and Iron Man. Ben has pioneered the use of physically based shaders in Terminator Salvation and Iron Man 2, which I hope to learn more about from his talk.

Color Enhancement and Rendering in Film and Game Production

The game side of the course has two speakers in common with the “physically-based shading” course:

• Yoshiharu Gotanda will talk about his work on film and camera emulation at tri-Ace, which is every bit as interesting as his physical shading work.

• I’ll discuss my experiences introducing filmic color grading techniques at the Activision studios.

And one additional speaker:

• While working at Electronic Arts, Haarm-Pieter Duiker applied his experience from films such as the Matrix series and Fantastic Four to game development, pioneering the filmic tone-mapping technique recently made famous by John Hable. He then moved back into film production, working on Speed Racer and 2012 (for which he won a VES award). Haarm-Pieter also runs his own company which makes tools for film color management.

The theoretical background and film production side will be covered by a roster of speakers which (although I shouldn’t say this since I’m organizing the course) is nothing less than awe-inspiring:

• Dominic Glynn is lead engineer of image mastering at Pixar Animation Studios. He has worked on films including Cars, The Wild, Ratatouille, Up and Toy Story 3. Dominic will talk about how color enhancement and rendering is done at different stages of the Pixar rendering pipeline.

• Joseph Goldstone (Lilliputian Pictures LLC) is a prominent consulting color scientist; his film credits include Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Batman Returns, Apollo 13, The Fifth Element, Titanic, and Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. He has contributed to industry standards committees such as the International Color Consortium (ICC) and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science’s Image Interchange Framework.

• Joshua Pines is vice president of color imaging R&D at Technicolor; between his work at Technicolor, ILM and other production companies he has over 50 films to his credit, including Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Forrest Gump, Twister, Mission: Impossible, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, The Mummy, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, The Aviator, and many others. Joshua lead the development of ILM’s film scanning system and has a Technical Achievement Award from the Motion Pictures Academy of Arts & Sciences for his work on film archiving.

• Jeremy Selan is the color pipeline lead at Sony Pictures Imageworks. He has worked on films including Spider-Man 2 and 3, Monster House, Surf’s Up, Beowulf, Hancock, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Jeremy has contributed to industry standards committees such as the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI), SMPTE, and the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Science’s Image Interchange Framework. At the course, Jeremy will unveil an exciting new initiative he has been working on at Imageworks.

• The creative aspects of color grading will be covered by Stefan Sonnenfeld, senior vice president at Ascent Media Group as well as president, managing director, and co-founder of Company 3. An industry-leading DI colorist, Stefan has worked on almost one hundred films including Being John Malkovich, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, War of the Worlds, Mission: Impossible III, X-Men: The Last Stand, 300, Dreamgirls, Transformers, Sweeney Todd, Cloverfield, The Hurt Locker, Body of Lies, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Where the Wild Things Are, Alice in Wonderland, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and many others, as well as numerous high-profile television projects.

• Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games
• Beyond Programmable Shading
• Real-Time Global Illumination for Dynamic Scenes
• Efficient Substitutes for Subdivision Surfaces
• Scattering
• Advanced Illumination Techniques for GPU Volume Raycasting
• Next Billion Cameras
• Build Your Own 3D Scanner: Optical Triangulation for Beginners
• Computation and Cultural Heritage: Fundamentals and Applications
• Interactive Sound Rendering
  

SIGGRAPH courses are a consistently good source of information – if any of these courses are about a topic which interests you, you might want to take the time to read the course notes and slides.