I came back from New Orleans and this years Siggraph last week. It was very interesting as always, though a little smaller than previous years. No doubt because of the economic situation. Around 20 000 people attended the conference. There was also a noticeable lack of company parties this year. Rockstar and nVidia being notable exceptions. When the movie industry doesn't deliver the real-time people have to step up I guess...

In terms of research and presentations there were some interesting stuff. Crytek presented their real time global illumination with light volumes technique. Interesting and impressive stuff. Alot of the stuff reminds me of what we did in my master thesis with lightpropagation.

Alex Evans gave, in my opinion, the best presentation in terms of performance (in tough competition with the FIRE! guy) about the rendering and content engine in Little Big Planet. Everything is cloth and simulated every frame. The RSX basicly renders and polygon soup with material properties.

For more interesting materials see the course notes from Advances in real time rendering (notes not published yet) and Beyond programmable shading course. The later featured my collegue Johan Andersson talking about Parallell graphics in Frostbite and some experiments with Dx11 compute shader.