#5 nVidia shield
Nvidia did it again. After the overpriced portable android console, the came up with this console like android device that should be halfway between a android TV box like many other (nexus Tv, fire TV) and a console. Powered by Tegra X1 Gpu, they claim that their GPU is 2.5 faster than a xbox 360 and to demonstrate that they showed a very choppy and low quality demo of borderland. To be fair there was also a quite impressive port of crysis 3, but still looked like a downgrade to the old gen version. It will come with a streaming service that will be able to stream most of PC games form their cloud, the target price is 200$. Personally I think that if you want to break in the console market you need to show some muscle and not came up with a very underpowered system compared to the competitor at a price that is indeed lower, but still a considerable amount of money. I do think that and android based console (a proper one) will have some chance.
#4 valve and HTC presented their VR technology
Valve also jumped on VR ship, we already knew they were working on a cross vendor sdk. The VIVE (that's the name of the device) comes with tracking device to locate the viewer position and two nunchack-like controller to handle the problem of user interaction. There was a little confusion and disappointment for some misleading suggestion made by HTC about a new Half life game that had to withdraw later on. People that tried it swear that is the best VR headset available, but right now there are so many out there I've lost the count. I'm sure steam core audience will be the perfect customer for VR and they probably did a good move, It is just I'm bit warm about all this VR thing.
#3 Epic presentation
After last year big announcement (unreal 4 open source and available to everybody for a 20$/month subscription) , coming up with a totally free subscription system was the natural evolution. Now you can subscribe to their website, link you account to their github and you can start to hack in their code!
There was a quiete impressive realtime demo (at least they claim so), a boy and his kite, that shows a 16kmx16km area with graphics details that are beyond imagination. There was also a discussion about the future of the entertainment industry in general, not only videogames but also cinema, and how VR will change our way to watch a movie, bit unrealistic to my point of view. Let's see if this time they can dethrone unity as mobile engine of choice.
#2 SIMD at insomniac games
This year the GDC was a bit weak on the technical slides especially about graphics, the most interesting stuff were by imagination technology aimed to push their ray cast api for their mobile GPU. This talk by Andreas Fredriksson one of most interesting, and I am a long time fan of Mike Acton & co and their doctrine about data oriented programming and this talk about how to do modern simd programming use intrinsics just enforces once more that they are right.
#1 Vulkan presentation.
Khronos group and Graham Sellers finally unveils the long awaited OpenGL successor, Vulkan. After almost 25 years OpenGL could be replaced. It is cross vendor standard and I think most of them will soon provide Vulkan implementation since it should be easier to write drive and maintain them and also we have come to a time in which we need to squeeze more horse power from our videocard using software because adding raw processing power became each generation more difficult. Vulkan itself is not a very new concept, people familiar with console API know what I mean, it is based on the same principle mantle and ps4 graphic library is based on: a low level access to the graphic hardware. So low level that you can directly write your command buffer. The real news is about SPIR-V, a new binary standard for GPU intermediate language that should simplify shader compilation process at a point that it should be even possible to have a C++ front end for it. Can you Imagine writing shaders in c++ ? full slides here
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