Mauricio Vives, Autodesk employee, recently attended the I3D symposium in Bethesda, Maryland and wrote up his experience over at the Realtime Rendering blog. I3D is a conference primarily for games, so it is heavily focused on real-time rendering of primarily static and tightly-controlled environments.
However, an emerging trend in graphics research for games is to remove limitations while maintaining performance, and that was very evident at I3D. The papers and posters generally made a point to remove limitations, in particular so that geometry, lighting, and viewpoints can be fully dynamic, without lengthy precomputation. This is great news for leveraging these techniques beyond games.
In terms of technology, this is almost all about doing work on GPUs, preferably with parallel algorithms. NVIDIA’s CUDA was very well-represented for “GPGPU” techniques that could not use the normal graphics pipeline. With the wide availability of CUDA, a theme in problem-solving is to express as much as possible with uniform grids and throw a lot of threads at it! As far as I could tell, Larrabee was entirely absent from the conference. Direct3D 11 was mentioned only in passing; almost all of the papers used D3D9, D3D10, or OpenGL for rendering.
As the conference is single-track, Mauricio attended every talk and has a brief synopsis of each.
