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GDCE2010: Tech session summary: "Multi-thread games with DirectX 11"

By Michael J Huelskoetter (90 posts) on August 17, 2010 at 4:21 am

Day two at Game Developers Conference Europe 2010 started for me at 9:00 am sharp, as Jerome Muffat-Meridol from Intel held his presentation "UFO invasion: DX11 and Multicore to the Rescue". The good news: the room was really packed with developers although it was quite early and the barbecue party yesterday night was really good what I heard so far!

For all of you guys who couldn't attend Jerome's tech session I shot some pictures and put them on Flickr. Jerome had some interesting thing to show and to tell:

• The multicore era has started already, but parallelism in apps and games for many developers is still a future topic

• Divide and surrender when thinking of the good old days of executing game code

• Different stages of game execution is highly parallel, but the execution itself is still real sequential!

• Compared to typical task schedulers an improved task scheduler which is being used within the nulstein demo are based on task stealing which helps use available thread resources as best as possible

• the "trick" of the nulstein demo and its highly performing multi-threading code: all "things" in the game are entities which can be manipulated and executed in parallel

• Updates on entities are mostly dependent!

• But we learnt a lot about rendering processes within the nulstein demo as well! And about multi-threaded rendering with DirectX 11.

• And the funniest thing about nulstein demo: multi-threading with DirectX 11 has no impact on runtimes at all! But: although DirectX 11 doesn't scale (due to missing drivers) it has an impact as frames will be rendered faster as the whole system works orthogonally!

So, and if you are really keen on hearing more about Jerome's presentation we have good news for you: we have interviewed him after his presentation and will present the result as a video clip soon. So, stay tuned...

Categories: Events, Game Development, Parallel Programming
Tags: GDCEurope2010

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Comments (3)

August 17, 2010 8:14 AM PDT Jérôme Muffat-Méridol (Intel) Total Points: 2,199 Brown Belt

For those interested, presentation material and source code are now live here : http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/nulstein/

August 20, 2010 8:12 PM PDT ricky143 Total Points: 60 Registered User

thank u Jerome!! was interesting..

August 22, 2010 9:59 PM PDT Brad

Very interesting! I admire people like Jerome who spend the time to get the most out of something. It's such a shame to be wasting all the power in high end PCs. Is it possible to see a video of the UFO Invasion demo that Jerome created? I'm currently OS for a year & my little laptop won't run the exe. Maybe put it on youtube. As a hardcore gamer, I'd be interested in seeing what he was able to complish. Oh & I like the projects motto :) Cheers.

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