Session Name: | Advanced Visual Effects with DirectX 11: Tessellation in Call of Duty: Ghosts |
Speaker(s): | Wade Brainerd |
Company Name(s): | Activision |
Track / Format: | Programming |
Overview: | This session will describe how Infinity Ward leveraged hardware tessellation in Call of Duty: Ghosts to improve image quality and artist efficiency on PCs and next generation consoles, while maintaining the games trademark high-frame rate. Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces are an artist friendly, efficient representation for next-generation models. Recent research, including feature adaptive subdivision surfaces by Matthias Niessner and Charles Loop, has made it possible to efficiently render these surfaces in real-time. A detailed description of Call of Duty's Sub-D pipeline will be presented, including best practices and enhancements to the feature adaptive subdivision surfaces technique. Additionally, the session will provide an overview of our world displacement mapping pipeline, which enabled artists to quickly upgrade the appearance of levels by adding fine detail to terrain geometry. The session will describe novel techniques and low-level bottleneck mitigation strategies that enabled us to overcome performance problems typically associated with tessellation. |