For those who have already submitted an entry, you should have received your licenses for the Intel tools suite. I am encouraging you to use them to exploit the hidden potential in your games. There's a ton of great information on ISN about using the toolset. In fact, I just got done reading "Optimizing Architectures with Intel Threading Building Blocks" available on Gamasutra http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3970/sponsored_feature_optimizing_game_.php by Brad Worth (a college of mine). Brad gives an excellent tutorial on how Treading Building Blocks can dramatically enhance the performance of a game with very little investment from the programmer. He shows how simply switching to the TBB version of the standard containers ( vectors, queues, etc) can result in as much as a 1.21 increase (on his test system). If any of you are using TBB in your submissions, please let us know what kind of speedups you are seeing.
Oh yeah, speaking of optimizations - if you have entered the "Best Game on Integrated Graphics" category make sure you read over the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator Developer's Guide: /en-us/articles/intel-graphics-media-accelerator-developers-guide
This document provides valuable insight on how to structure your game for maximum performance with Intel Graphics, it’s a must read. The new version includes details on the new Intel® GPA tool. Basically, Intel GPA is a tool that lets you identify bottlenecks in the GPA and see how the division of labor is split across the GPA and CPU. I've been getting familiar with this tool myself and hope to be posting more about my experiences with it in future blog posts. If you are using this tool let us know about it.
In other non-gaming news, I recently published a whitepaper about the H.264 DXVA work that Casmier666 and I did with MPC-HC. Many thanks to him for his help. If you find this material useful let me know. I am currently working on another paper for the VC1 format. Also, there should be a Take 5 interview of me posted next week <gulp>, please be kind - my talents obviously don’t lie in front of a camera!
Keep those Level Up 2009 entries coming in!
Thanks for reading
Eric