SIGGRAPH 2017—The Year of the Game Engine & Low-Level Graphics API

SIGGRAPH 2017 in Los Angeles set a new tone for the industry as the evolution of technical, creative, & new avenues of content creation were explored. This was definitely the year of the game engine and how it is driving low-level GPU technology for VR/AR/MR and expanding in new markets creating a cross platform universe.

It is hard to judge SIGGRAPH from the size of the Exhibit Hall as Vendors have opted to rent their own rooms in the Convention Center or rent space close by to do their demos. This allows them more freedom to get the users to focus on what they are saying without the distraction of the loud Exhibits show floor. So anyone who says the Exhibits Hall was small did not explore the vendor’s demo rooms.

The Unreal Engine was displayed in almost every Emerging Technology booth. It was used for artistic purposes to create a variety of art forms or there were demos of UE4 being used to create interactive games/experiences, medical purposes, or an interview with a TV personality. UE4 had no limits for what it could be used for. VR was the main focus for the Unreal Engine at SIGGRAPH. Marc Petit, the General Manager for Unreal Engine stated, that Architectural Visualization was a big market in Europe and he believed it would be adapted in the U.S. market in the near future. We saw this last year from the

VR was the main focus for the Unreal Engine at SIGGRAPH. Marc Petit, the General Manager for Unreal Engine stated that Architectural Visualization was a big market in Europe and he believed it would be adapted in the U.S. market in the near future. We saw this last year from the NVIDIA headquarters design presentation. The NVIDIA headquarters designed by Hao Ko from Gensler used Virtual Reality (VR) as an essential part of the design process. You could explore the design with a touch of the mouse button, walking through the entire design in real time using the NVIDIA Quadro card technology. At the Unreal User Group at SIGGRAPH this year, Epic announced Datasmith, a private beta designed to help artists and designers simplify the process of importing data into the Unreal Engine from over 20 CAD/DCC sources, including Autodesk 3DsMax. Abvent also made an announcement at the User Group that Twinmotion 2018 will be powered by the latest Unreal Engine technology.

This is big news because for the first time this interactive renderer will be available on the Mac running native on Mac hardware. ArchiCAD users can use it easily and efficiently. Chaos Group announced VRay for Unreal at the User Group. You can bring VRay content from other DCC’s into the real time engine editor, render real time directly into the game editor, and export from the real time editor for use in another DCC. Epic is creating a cross platform universe for all creators.

Architectural tools aren’t just used in real world design, so you must explore the idea of VR & AR content and how these worlds will need architects to create real living spaces that respond to real world physics. Emerging Technologies had several demonstrations of how architectural design professionals are building entire cities as the backdrop to characters or creating real time interactive spaces for people to socialize in.

Unity showed off a spectacular CG short film called “Adam” using Cinemachine, (a unified procedural camera system) and Timeline designed to give you control of your scene. I watched as the presenter Adam Myhill, Head of Cinematics for Unity Technologies, showed me the film and made editorial changes in real time to individual elements on the fly…you could do these edits to control individual elements within Unity to get exactly what you want. These changes only change the specific layers you want to edit, for example, you could change the character and the background remains unchanged…allowing complete control over individual elements giving the filmmaker control of their film in ways you can’t do in other editing programs. Architecturally I can see this being used for visualization. How many times have you had a client want to change something that requires you to take so many steps backward to get to that design change, destroying everything else in the process? This will allow you control of elements individually so you can work faster and more efficiently without losing other data.

Unreal Engine and Unity are the leaders of the Game Engine market and both are bringing new sets of tools for Architects, Interior Designers and Visualization Artists that can embed client and designer in the same space to interact in a way that gives both a better understanding of their needs. Each Game Engine offers a different approach but both deliver high-quality solutions that both run on the Mac. Imagine what you will be able to do with the iMac Pro.

next page: Looking at the Story Around Low-Level Graphics APIs

Low-Level Graphics APIs

If we are going to talk about VR, AR, and MR, we must talk about the low-level GPU API’s like Vulkan and Metal that speed up GPU performance including better frame rate and rendering times. Vulkan from the Khronos Group and Metal from Apple are low-level GPU API’s. They work differently from OpenGL as OpenGL goes through a deeper software layer before accessing the GPU while Vulkan and Metal have near direct access to the GPU.

Vulkan is a graphics and computer API consisting of procedures and functions that specify, share programs, computer kernels, objects and operations involved in producing high-quality color graphical images in 3D. Vulkan is also a programmable pipeline and state driven, fixed function stages are invoked by a set of specific drawing operations. It means it is a cross platform solution available for developers of desktops and mobile solutions.

Apple’s Metal API

Metal 2 API provides near direct access to the GPU allowing more efficient graphics and compute potential for your apps in iOS, macOS, and tvOS. It is a low-overhead architecture with precompiled shaders, fine-grained resource control, and multithreading support. These low-level API’s boost performance across multiple platforms by taking control of the rendering pipeline. Epic announced during SIGGRAPH that Vulkan would be the default API in Linux Games on the Unreal Engine.

When Apple introduced Metal v.1, Epic built in support for Metal in UE v. 4.3 on the Mac. Epic was one of the first to support Metal when Apple unveiled the API at WWDC in 2014 with Apple’s Zen Garden demo and showed support for Metal 2 in the Star Wars VR demo. Khronos also released OpenGL 4.6 with SPIR-V Support.  SPIR-V is a Khronos defined standard that allows simplifying shader authoring and management pipelines while providing source shading language flexibility. OpenGL 4.6 adds support for ingesting SPIR-V shaders.

MORE: SIG: The Khronos Group Releases Major Update to Graphics API—OpenGL 4.6 with SPIR-V Support

OpenGL 4.6 adds support for ingesting SPIR-V shaders ensuring SPIR-V shaders will be widely accessible in OpenGL implementations.  There have been mixed benchmarks if Vulkan and Metal are faster, as in some cases OpenGL is faster at other tasks. I expect this to change in the future. Autodesk, The Foundry, and a few other developers also announced their support for Metal 2 at the WWDC event this past year, but implementation will take time and many companies are waiting for the release of the new iMac Pro before making further announcements.

As VR and AR technology companies are growing in the market space, AMD and NVIDIA are competing like never before. The good thing is that competition means better solutions for users. AMD and NVIDIA have different marketing philosophies, but they both want to deliver fast, efficient solutions to their customers. AMD had a huge presentation party on July 30^th where the focus was not just on the GPU but the ability of the hardware to use both CPU and GPU simultaneously to get the biggest bang for the buck. NVIDIA’s presentation was a bit different focus on the “AI Revolution”. Today NVIDIA’s GPU’s simulates human intelligence that is acting as a brain for computers, self-driving cars, and robots.

As we move forward in the worlds of VR/AR/MR we are going to see a lot more of this technology grow, and the new iMac Pro will be part of the revolution. It will be interesting to see the future for both low-level graphic API’s and if they replace OpenGL or DirectX. Apple’s iMac Pro will be Apple’s first hardware Pro solution to this new market landscape. Metal will help this iMac Pro be able to run higher frame rates that are needed in VR/AR/MR and render real time 3D content. Unreal Engine and Unity will be providing support for Apple’s Metal 2. Twinmotion 2018 will now run natively on the Mac giving architects a new real time rendering solution, Chaos Groups announcement of VRay for Unreal expands tools for architectural visualization in a new way. Unity gives you cinematic rendering using Octane, plus control of individual elements in Cinemachine/Timeline. Architects can now build interactive solutions for their clients using a variety of new tools. VR/AR/MR will give them a whole new world to consider when applying their expertise.