I Market the World's Best Game Performance Tools

By Aaron Davies (Intel) (2 posts) on March 4, 2010 at 9:42 am


An introduction is in order; my name is Aaron Davies and I've been playing video games since I was 5. My dad brought home an Apple II and I was instantly hooked. I learned to type playing Zork and Mystery House. I learned to code so I could write my own games. I vividly remember going to a Stanford football game with my Dad, wishing the game would end soon because he promised to buy me Karateka on the way home. My first console was the Atari 2600. Yes, I personally remember playing Pong, Pitfall, and even E.T. My passion grew stronger with Excitebike and Metroid on my NES. Of all my affinity to gaming however, I was most drawn (and faithful) to PC gaming. The first time I built my own system, I did it just so I could play Falcon 4.0. I remember the first Grand Theft Auto. I was there for Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Red Baron, Space Quest, King's Quest, Flight Simulator, you name it. I knew at a young age that I not only loved to play games, I wanted to turn my passion for games into my career.

There were no game development programs offered "back in the day", so I opted for industrial design. The reason? A lab stocked with 20 bleeding edge SGI O2 systems, and licenses of both Alias Wavefront and Maya. This was where I'd get my 3D experience. To make a long story short, I hired out of school early and had my coursework written off as work experience credits for an early graduation. My first "real" job was creating flight simulators for the US Navy and NASA; I couldn't believe my luck. It fulfilled 2 of my passions: flying and 3d graphics. Yet I would go home every night and play Jetfighter III, which visually blew the socks off the multi-million dollar simulations I was working on. It was time to level up and I took my first job in the games space at a little game dev start-up. Just a few years later I joined THQ, and after doing my fair share of crunch transitioned from Art to Production track. When the time for a change eventually came along, I considered multiple publisher and studio jobs, alongside Intel.

People inside and outside of Intel find out about my background and ask, almost without fail: "Why did you choose Intel?" I'll assume you care to know as well. You're still reading my epistle.

First of all, I got to move to Oregon. If you haven't been to Oregon, make it a bucket list item. This state is absolutely beautiful. I live 10 minutes from downtown to the East, yet only 10 minutes from work to the west. One hour to Mt. Hood for snowboarding. One hour to the coast. You get the idea.

Secondly, after teaching collegiate level courses on game development in my off-hours, and becoming intrigued/inspired by game industry-changing events, I wanted to actually be part of a big technological revolution. I had participated, on the game developer/publisher end, in multiple console and hardware launches and wanted to represent developers from within a hardware company. I wanted to see how (or if) hardware vendors listened to what game developers needed, and designed to fulfill such needs. Larrabee was my promise of involvement in something unconventional and ground-breaking.

I look back over the past 2 years since I joined Intel and realize that I've been involved in some really cool things; some public and others not so much. When I came onboard I inherited marketing and strategic responsibility for what at the time was a small, new tool to support existing and forthcoming Intel® Graphics parts. I'll never forget the first trip to engage with the first game studios to see what would later be released as Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers. With bloodshot eyes from lack of sleep due to some last minute fixes and long flights, we began to etch a virtual Rosetta Stone for game developers, so they could scale or optimize performance and tap into the millions of Intel® Integrated Graphics based machines in the market today. We returned invigorated at the response we received from developers, armed with feedback justifying some tricky strategic decisions I'd have to go to battle for, and justified in the work we had done. Not only did we internally share the vision of what Intel® GPA had to offer, we now had external game studios who believed as well.

After a really incredible private beta program with some partners even I was surprised we were able to work with, we launched Intel® GPA at GDC'09. Leading up to launch, I shared with the engineering team my expectation for downloads & users of the new, platform-agnostic graphics performance tools. At the time I thought it to be a pretty aggressive number. The engineering manager challenged me to a bet: "Through the end of the year, I'll give you $1 for each download above that number, and you give me $1 for each download below that number." In a moment of weakness of conviction, and thinking that maybe I was just full of myself, I passed on making that bet. With a glib smirk on his face, he handed me a check at the end of 2009 for a substantial amount of money, with the bolded word "VOID" written across it. Had I made the bet I'd be picking up the tab at GDC this year. The good news is that we all realized we really do have something incredible here.

It's hard to believe it's only been one year since last GDC. It's even harder to believe that the incredible new version (3.0) we're releasing at GDC next week is so much better than what we released last year. We've added a breadth of features which allow game devs to visualize and solve performance problems on the entire PC hardware platform (CPU & GPU). I'm thrilled we've been able to partner with 2K/Firaxis to support Civilization V; a real-world example of how the tools can help developers scale their titles to play on as many PC configs as possible. If you'll be at GDC this year you've got to join us Thursday 4:30pm in North Hall Room 122, where you'll see a real-time Civ V/GPA 3.0 demo with Dan Baker from Firaxis. I firmly believe we've created something unique, superior, and (in my opinion critical) accessible whether you're running a Intel® Graphics/CPUs or not. This has been and will continue to be driven by the needs of game developers; our momentum has only just begun.

As the Sr. Marketing Manager for Game Performance Tools, I've been able to work with and become friends with a broad array of genuine AAA game developers, literally across the globe. I guess you could say that after 11 years in the game dev space I'm not personally making or producing games any more. Yet in an uncanny way, I've been able to positively impact more titles that I could have in my previous roles. I market the world's best game performance tools.

Categories: Art, Music, & Animation, Events, Game Development, Graphics & Media, Mobility, Parallel Programming
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Comments (1)

March 5, 2010 4:23 PM PST

Matt Ployhar (Intel)
Matt Ployhar (Intel)Total Points:
3,617
Brown Belt
 Aaron - Great post! Thank you for introducing yourself to us! GPA is a fantastic product & I definitely look forward to seeing both it mature, and your future contributions to the Graphics/Gaming industry!

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