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Orion Granatir (Intel)

Orion works as a senior software engineer in Intel’s Visual Computing Software Development team, a fancy name for “Orion works on video games at Intel.” Most of his current work focuses on optimizing for the latest Intel technology (SSE/AVX, multithreading, processor graphics, etc). While in this role Orion has presented at GDC 2008, Gamefest 2008, GDC Online 2008, GDC 2009, GDC 2010, and IDF. Prior to joining Intel, Orion worked on several PlayStation 3 titles as a senior programmer with Insomniac Games. The game titles he has worked on include Resistance: Fall of Man and Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. In a previous life, Orion worked on digital cockpits in the aviation industry. Orion is a content tourist and generally beats 4 or more videogames a month. Orion holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Oregon State University.

Understanding x86 vs ARM Memory Alignment on Android

By Orion Granatir (Intel) (9 posts) on August 18, 2011 at 12:10 pm
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With Google’s recent release of the NDK (r6), it is now possible build Android application for x86 processors in addition to ARM. In general, this only involves rebuilding native code to port applications from ARM to x86. However, there are a few pitfalls to avoid. One difference between x86 and ARM is the memory alignment [...]

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Category: Android, Embedded Computing, Game Development, Performance and Optimization
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A guide to optimizing graphics and games for Intel® Atom based platforms

By Orion Granatir (Intel) (9 posts) on February 25, 2011 at 5:12 pm
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Ron and I just finished up the first revision of the Atom graphics developers guide. You can download it here: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/mobile-graphics-developers-guides/ Topics covered include: - Intel® Atom processor optimizations - Understanding graphics packaged with Inte®l Atom processor based platforms - Tools to help optimize and profile game/graphic applications - Microsoft DirectX* optimizations (most of the [...]

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Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media, Intel® AppUp Developer Program, Performance and Optimization
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Building a highly scalable 3D particle system

By Orion Granatir (Intel) (9 posts) on February 18, 2011 at 1:16 pm
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Particle systems are an ideal candidate for multi-threading in games. Most games have particle systems and their general nature of independent entities lends well to parallelism. However, a naïve approach won’t load balance well on modern architectures. There are two complementary approaches, task-based threading and SSE, which are ideally suited for particle systems and will [...]

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Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media, Parallel Programming, Performance and Optimization
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Finding the Next Challenge in Visual Computing

By Orion Granatir (Intel) (9 posts) on February 7, 2011 at 3:57 pm
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Five years ago, a new wave of consoles brought the inception of High Definition (HD) content to the videogame industry. Some companies excelled in this era, others did not. Never the less, the industry is now HD. As evidenced by console manufacturers developing new input controls to extend the life of this generation of consoles, [...]

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Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media
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A Look at Sandy Bridge: Integrating Graphics into the CPU

By Orion Granatir (Intel) (9 posts) on January 13, 2011 at 3:45 pm
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Processor graphics will soon be found in computers everywhere. Intel calls this new capability Intel® HD Graphics; at AMD, it’s called AMD Fusion*. Both names refer to the integration of graphics functionality into the CPU. At CES this year, Intel introduced the 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ processors (codenamed “Sandy Bridge”). This processor is Intel’s first [...]

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Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media, Performance and Optimization
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Help: Writing a File Manager for Games?

By Orion Granatir (Intel) (9 posts) on March 11, 2009 at 9:16 am
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Programming a game is fun. It’s not every day that you get to work on algorithms for things like zombies, mechs, or aliens. However, a zombie wouldn’t be very scary if you couldn’t load the mesh, textures, or sounds. There are some less glorious tasks required to make a game. No one really wants to [...]

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Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media, Open Source, Parallel Programming
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Threaded AI: FTW

By Orion Granatir (Intel) (9 posts) on January 29, 2009 at 4:16 pm
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Writing threaded AI (Artificial Intelligence) is epic? It’s easier than you would think! I am going to give a presentation about multithreaded AI at GDC this year. We will examine how AI can be threaded and live in a highly parallel environment. How can you thread AI? How can AI talk to physics running on [...]

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Category: Graphics & Media, Parallel Programming, Software Tools
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Lock or Be Free

By Orion Granatir (Intel) (9 posts) on December 30, 2008 at 4:07 pm
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Jeff Andrews wrote a great article about multithreaded game engines over on Whatif.intel.com. These are the concepts that the Smoke (n-way threaded game framework) demo was built on. One of the readers, Josh, brought up a good comment (check out the comments at the bottom of the article). One of the questions in his comment [...]

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Category: Graphics & Media, Parallel Programming, Software Tools
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Introducing Smoke and Orion

By Orion Granatir (Intel) (9 posts) on December 10, 2008 at 9:16 am
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Hi all ^_^ This is the first of a series of blogs I am going to post about Smoke. Smoke is a demo developed by Intel to show n-way threading in a game framework… that’s a mouth full! Basically, it shows one way games can maximize the CPU. To maximize CPU utilization, a game needs [...]

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Category: Graphics & Media, Parallel Programming, Software Tools
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