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Analyzing Performance Shortfalls in XNA Game Studio Titles
Speaker: Matthew Picioccio
Your XNA Game Studio game doesn’t run as well as you expected, and you have no idea why. The first step towards fixing your title is to first understand your title: how it allocates memory, and how it uses the CPU and GPU. This talk demonstrates several of the tools and techniques available to XNA Game Studio developers to analyze their title’s performance shortfalls.
Faster How to Improve XNA Game Studio Title Performance
Speaker: Frank Savage
XNA Game Studio provides access to the powerful Xbox 360 console, with multiple CPUs, a complex GPU, and plenty of memory and storage space. Despite all of this power, your title may run slower than expected. This talk will examine several common causes of performance problems and how to address each of them.
Networking Traffic Jams and Schrodingers Cat
Speaker: Frank Savage
The XNA Framework networking API makes it easy to join a session and exchange data packets. But what exactly should you put in those packets? This talk explains how to overcome the challenges posed by limited bandwidth (if you send too much data, or fail to properly compress it, your game could end up even slower than my morning commute) and delivery latency (when packets arrive late, you must use prediction algorithms to smooth things out, creating a strange quantum world where each object has more than one state being simulated in parallel).
New Xbox 360 and DirectX SDK Features
Speaker: Mark Seminatore
The DirectX SDK and the Xbox 360 XDK continue to evolve with each release adding new features and tools to help game developers. This session provides an overview and demo of just some of the many additions since last year. Attendees will gain a broad understanding of the new tools and features.
Performance Tools Update
Speaker: Eric Langlois
The XNA Platform and Tools team has been hard at work delivering updates to PIX for both Xbox 360 and Windows. This session brings you up to speed on the new features and improvements made to this critical toolset for performance investigation and analysis of your title.
PIX and XNA Game Studio Diagnosing Performance Problems
Speaker: Rick Hoskinson
For years, professional game developers using the DirectX and Xbox 360 Software Development Kits have enjoyed the finest purpose-built performance analysis tools ever created for game development. The good news for game XNA Game Studio developers is that these same tools can be used to enhance their titles using Windows and the XNA Game Studio XDK Extensions. This presentation will explore how to use PIX for Windows and PIX for Xbox 360 to profile and interpret performance issues in XNA Game Studio titles.
Squeezing It All In
Speaker: David Cook
You’ve got gigabytes of juicy game content --- now where are you going to put it all? Preparing game content packages will soon become easier and more flexible due to new tools arriving in the XDK. We will present the available means of preparing your data: for emulation during development and testing, for placement on optical disc, and for play from hard drive. Through engagement with many real-world titles, we have developed a list of best practices for content management and production. This talk will discuss how to fit data into limited disc space and how to physically arrange data for optimal user experience.
The Top 10 List - CPU and GPU Performance Challenges
Speaker: Allan Murphy
This presentation will draw on the unique perspective of Microsoft's XNA Developer Connection (XDC) group to present an across the board survey of the performance issues even the very best Xbox 360 developers run into, how to identify those issues, and how to fix them. Applicable primarily to Xbox 360, but translating well to high end Windows game development, this set of mini-case studies forms a next-gen post-mortem which will help developers decide where to focus optimization effort.
XNA Game Studio Program Overview
Speaker: Matt Picioccio
XNA Game Studio has come a long way from XNA Game Studio Express 1.0. Learn about the new features in XNA Game Studio 3.0 and how to publish your game with the XNA Community Games publishing program. We are also unveiling the XNA Game Studio XDK Extensions, a new SDK that enables Xbox LIVE Arcade and retail game development with the XNA Framework on the Xbox 360.
XNA Game Studio XDK Extensions, Certification, and You
Speaker: Rick Hoskinson
The Holy Grail of XNA Game Studio game development is cost savings and shorter development times over that of large-budget native titles. A significant source of development cost for small developers can come from the time and effort necessary to polish a title for certification and release. This talk will show how the XNA Game Studio XDK Extensions reduce the time necessary to deliver a certifiable, polished title for mainstream release.
Windows 7 – What Does It Mean to Game Developers
Speaker: Chuck Walbourn
Description: The Windows 7 public Beta is out and getting a lot of technical press attention, but what exactly does it mean for game developers? This talk will summarize the new platform features, and detail the technical differences between Windows Vista and the upcoming new release. We’ll also review some of the common issues encountered moving from Windows XP to Windows 7 for code that’s not up to speed on Windows Vista.
Direct3D11 Multithreaded Rendering and Compute
Speaker: Kevin Gee
The Direct3D API is evolving to improve scalability and reduce the constraints of the current processing model. This enables developers to take full advantage of multiple CPU cores and also facilitates new GPU usage scenarios. This talk will discuss the changes made to the Direct3D11 API that enable resource management and rendering work to be submitted across multiple CPU threads. Direct3D 11 also introduces the Compute Shader as a new way to access the huge power of GPUs for brute force processing. It opens the door to use of more general data-structures and new classes of algorithms than GPUs have been able to deliver previously.
Direct3D11 Tessellation Deep Dive
Speaker: Matt Lee
Description: Direct3D 11 introduces three new graphics pipeline stages designed for flexible tessellation. This talk will summarize the design of the hull shader, tessellator, and domain shader pipeline stages, and outline their intended usage. The second half of the talk will describe in depth and demonstrate the real-time Catmull-Clark subdivision surface approximation algorithm developed by Microsoft Research and implemented in the DirectX SDK samples.
Get Ready for Windows 7
Speaker: Kyle Marsh
Description: The Windows® 7 operating system is the essential platform for developers. Windows 7 empowers developers to deliver creative solutions that are connected, high-fidelity, and provide a highly intuitive user experience. Most importantly, developer platform fundamentals such as security, performance, and compatibility are top priorities in Window 7. This presentation introduces Windows 7 and summarizes the key developer advances such as The New Taskbar and Shell Experience, Federated Search, Multi-touch Support, and Sensors and Location.
Lockless Programming
Speaker: Bruce Dawson
Description: Game Developers need to write multi-threaded code in order to make full use of today’s multi-core CPUs. In order to get maximum performance these threads must sometimes communicate without using locks. However lockless programming comes with significant challenges which must first be understood and overcome. This talk will explain the problems with locks and how lockless programming can avoid those limitations. It will then cover some of the challenges with lockless programming and how to manage them. Finally the talk will present some lockless techniques that have been successfully used in games. Concrete examples and performance measurements will be shown.
Out of Order: Making In-Order Processors Play Nicely
Speaker: Allan Murphy
Description: Code that performs well on PC does not always perform well on the in-order processors in modern consoles. Adapting code to suit in-order processors is tricky, and requires care and attention. This session illustrated the strategies you can employ to get great performance on in-order CPUs, including tackling load-hit-stores, L2 miss, branch mispredicts and expensive instructions.
The Beauty of Destruction
Speaker: Pete Isensee
Description: C++ destructors are the most important feature of C++. The power wielded through deterministic object unwinding cannot be underestimated. Resource leaks are the bane of games, and destructors are an essential part of the solution. But destructors provide much more than simple object cleanup. This presentation will cover all aspects of C++ object destruction, ranging from destructor performance to best practices. Topics include order of destruction, implicit destructors, and details around how destructors are affected by exception handling, polymorphism, and partially constructed objects. This also covers related topics like the delete operator, STL allocator::deallocate, and shared_ptr deletors.
NetGrove: New Tools for Network Optimization
Speaker: Tomas Vykruta
Description: NetGrove is one of the newest and most potent tools in the network programmer’s arsenal. Topics covered include bandwidth compression techniques, appropriate packet and topology choices, common pitfalls based on technical reviews of real titles, expected best practices for the console and latest consumer bandwidth trends. The talk will provide demonstrations of a number of NetGrove’s features that build on the packet sniffing capabilities of NetMon 3.1 as well as provide easy-to-adopt techniques for tuning games to typical bandwidths and latencies.
