SIGGRAPH 2021 REAC: Geometry Rendering Pipeline Architecture at Activision

This talk presents an engine rendering pipeline for Activision games with particular focus on geometry pre-processing, merging and preparation stages for various rendering modes.

Part of SIGGRAPH 2021 Rendering Engine Architecture in Games course, for more about the course, see http://enginearchitecture.realtimeren...

There are multiple rendering primitives used in the engine, varying in cost and visual complexity, that require different approaches for optimal rendering. Such primitives range between height field-based terrain, high density meshes, procedural meshes, procedurally placed meshes as well as simple yet heavy overdraw models mostly used to represent foliage. Our geometry processing pipeline unifies all those inputs, via merging into highly optimized intermediate formats, that are later used to prepare intermediate data for main rendering passes. Main lit rendering effectively mixes Forward+ with Visibility Buffer style rendering approaches or optimal performance. Furthermore, all methods are optimized to work with our software variable resolution shading system.

This talk covers the general architecture of our render pipeline with focus on certain novel approaches, provides comparative performance analysis dependent on specific render scenarios - ranging from closed indoor spaces, open world outdoors as well as more specific heavy triangle and alpha test overdraw scenes. Finally, current work in progress and future extensions are discussed.

Speaker:

Michal Drobot is a Technology Fellow at Infinity Ward, an Activision studio, and a Studio Head at Infinity Ward Poland. Most recently he worked on the rendering architecture of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Before that he helped in designing and optimizing the 3D renderer in Far Cry 4 at Ubisoft Montreal. Prior to that he worked at Guerrilla Games, designing and optimizing the rendering pipeline for the PlayStation 4 launch title Killzone: Shadow Fall. Michal specializes in rendering algorithms, render architectures, hardware architectures and low-level optimizations.