Passes for the Game Developers Conference 2015 are still available, and as the conference draws closer we're announcing even more sessions for the Main Conference that you'll want to check out.
Today we're highlighting a number of informative sponsored sessions from Sony, AMD and other influential game companies. If you're looking for an opportunity to learn about how cutting-edge hardware and software works from a game developer's perspective, these are the talks you want to keep on your radar.
How to get the most out of select PlayStation 4 features
At GDC 2015, Sony's own Jon Webb and Zev Solomon (a senior manager and senior engineer, respectively) will run down some of PS4's powerful social and community features and how you can build your games to take advantage of these features to provide new and unique user experiences.
If you're interested in making games for the console, check out Sony's sponsored session on "Creating Powerful Connected Experiences for the PlayStation 4." Expect to hear them discuss best practices and showcase some examples of titles making use of these features today, so you can design your own games to best take advantage of the console's unique social and community features.
Get AMD's perspective on wringing performance out of DirectX 12
Microsoft announced DirectX 12 last year at GDC, and this time around AMD is hosting a sponsored session to help game makers understand how to wring maximum performance and efficiency out of the new tools.
At "DirectX 12: A New Meaning for Efficiency and Performance," AMD engineers Dave Oldcorn and Stephan Hodes will showcase how the Direct3D 12 API hooks into modern AMD graphics hardware.
Direct3D 12 adds key new rendering features such as multiple queues for asynchronous compute and DMA, and the ultra-performance API both eliminates performance bottlenecks and enables new techniques. Oldcorn and Hodes will talk about the key interactions between the new D3D12 capabilities and AMD hardware and how to get the best from both; check it out for some potentially useful tech advice and some neat live demos.
Learn how Bungie crafted the cloth and hair tech of Destiny
Bungie's Destiny called for hundreds of cloth and hair assets to be built quickly and efficiently by a small team of artists and tech artists. In their Autodesk-sponsored presentation "Character Cloth and Hair Tech in Bungie's Destiny," resident Bungie artists Tom Sanocki and Natalie Burke will walk you through how the studio used Autodesk's Maya to build custom artist-friendly tools in order to construct and quickly iterate on cloth and hair.
Stop by to learn about Bungie's process of designing these tools, get a brief overview of the studio's approach to designing usable tools, and see the in-game results running in real-time.
Further details on these and many more announced talks are available now in the online GDC 2015 Session Scheduler, where you can begin to plan out your conference week and later export it to the up-to-the-minute GDC Mobile App, coming soon.
Conference officials look forward to announcing more GDC 2015 sessions spanning a diverse array of game industry issues in the months ahead.
For more information on GDC 2015, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
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