Intel® Game Dev All Access 2023

Modern performance, simplified. Deliver the best experiences in your games with the expertise of Intel’s game development engineers. Explore their topics to tackle DirectX 12 features, X^e Super Sampling, ray tracing, and more with confidence while extracting optimal performance from the CPUs and GPUs of today and beyond.

View our Presentations:

• XeSS – High Quality Super Sampling from iGPU to dGPU
• The Evolution of Variable Rate Shading In Games
• Scalable Real-time Ray Tracing
• Programming for Hybrid: Untangling your Threads
• Optimizing for Hybrid in Total War: WARHAMMER III
• Optimize Games Across Platforms
• Maximum DirectStorage

XeSS – High Quality Super Sampling from iGPU to dGPU

Vladimir Travkin
Senior Director, Applied AI

X^eSS is an AI-based super-sampling technique which reconstructs a low-resolution non-antialiased frame into a high-resolution fully-antialiased frame. And it does that at a fraction of the cost of high-resolution native rendering.

During this talk, we introduce X^eSS and cover some of the challenges that upscalers have to deal with. Then we follow that by going through updates that X^eSS 1.1 brings and watch demos on Intel integrated and discrete GPUs. We will also talk about best practices and guidelines on how to integrate X^eSS into a game title. Last topic is the upcoming X^eSS Dataset Toolkit that makes it easy to collect and assemble a custom X^eSS model training dataset for a particular game title.

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The Evolution of Variable Rate Shading In Games

Marissa du Bois
Sr. Graphics Engineer

Want to know how to get the most performance out of Variable Rate Shading Tier 1 and Tier 2 in your game with minimal quality loss? Learn about the evolution of VRS-based techniques for game optimizations and see how Intel has integrated VRS Tier 1 and Tier 2 into game engines and AAA games.

Additionally, we’ll demonstrate our integration of Variable Rate Shading Tier 2 using Intel’s Velocity and Luminance Adaptive Rasterization (VALAR) algorithm in World of Warcraft: Dragonflight.

At the end of the talk we’ll deep dive into an emerging use-case for Variable Rate Shading, specifically, combining VRS with ML-based Super-Sampling techniques like Intel’s X^eSS.

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Scalable Real-time Ray Tracing

Adam Lake
GPU Rendering Software Engineer

Make the most of ray tracing on Intel GPU hardware today and look forward to the future of ray tracing tomorrow. Equipped with insights from the past year as we worked with ISVs to optimize game rendering workloads on Intel ARC GPUs, Adam Lake provides a review of Intel’s ray tracing GPU hardware along with a set of actionable performance optimizations. The second half looks toward the future of ray tracing, where we discuss a vision of enabling scalable ray tracing algorithms across mainstream and high-end GPUs. To visualize this future, we’ll share some early results of the work going on at Intel to more fully realize scalable ray tracing pipelines.

As we transition to a world where ray tracing is available — not just at the high end but even in mainstream graphics — such scalable solutions will allow us to use ray tracing across a wider gamut of machines, ultimately overcoming the visual quality artifacts of screen space rasterization effects commonplace in rendering pipelines today.

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Programming for Hybrid: Untangling your Threads

Leigh Davies
Senior Game/Graphics Application Engineer

Multi-threaded game engines should “just work”™ on a modern PC. In reality, as hardware becomes more complex the interaction between the OS and the game becomes more important. Discover some of the tribal knowledge of how hybrid thread scheduling works and what to look out for when profiling games with this session, which covers the basics of Windows thread scheduling and how it is applied to hybrid architectures. You’ll also gain an understanding of common profiling tools that can be used to see how your gaming interacts with the OS and how to ensure your threads run where you want them to.

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Optimizing for Hybrid in Total War: Warhammer III

Steve Hughes, Intel
Scott Pitkethly, Creative Assembly

As game framerates commonly reach >200fps on modern CPU & GPU hardware, we are increasingly aware that not everything in our game needs to be updated that frequently. In this talk we look at decoupling workloads so we can run different components of a game’s CPU content at different frequencies. We look at the advantages and disadvantages of decoupling and we will see how Hybrid Architecture can make the transition smoother. After the theory, Creative Assembly show us how they put practice these techniques to simplify the desynchronization of several game workloads in Total War: Warhammer III.

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Optimize Games Across Platforms

Pamela Harrison, Software Technical Consulting Engineer
Jennifer DiMatteo, Software Technical Consulting Engineer

Learn how to quickly find and root-cause the hottest bottlenecks in your games.

Optimization is critical for game development. Knowing where bottlenecks are and what their severity is, guides game developers in improving framerate with the least possible time and effort.

Our Partner, Soma Games, more than tripled the FPS in one of their games: The Scout chapter of The Lost Legends of Redwall™ series. They captured a frame with their Intel Core + NVIDIA RTX platform running at a decent 50 fps. They wanted a little more speed, so we showed them how to use Intel® GPA. In less than 3 weeks with the help of GPA profiling they increased from 50 to 181 FPS.

Attend this session to learn how to quickly find and assess bottlenecks in your games.

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Maximum DirectStorage

Ani Alston
Graphics Engineer

Microsoft recently released DirectStorage 1.1 with support for GPU data decompression, allowing games to load assets filling the entire GPU VRAM in less than a second. This session presents an overview of how Intel implemented DirectStorage API support, showing optimization findings from our implementation of an efficient texture streamer, Expanse, built on top of Virtual Texture and DirectStorage 1.1.

At the end of this talk, technical directors, rendering engineers, systems engineers, and technical artists will be able to make early decisions for their tech stack using DirectStorage 1.1. This increased bandwidth and the fast loading times that can be achieved with DirectStorage 1.1 enables you to create new exciting gameplay opportunities.