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Ubisoft Cloth Simulation: Performance Postmortem and Journey from C++ to Compute Shaders
Assassin's Creed Unity and Far Cry 4 make intensive use of cloth simulation. The first part of this talk is a postmortem of the usage of cloth simulation within these two games and is focused on performance. You'll see why some parts of the code were much more costly than initially planned, as well as the position of the cloth simulation module inside the game engine loop and the consequences. For the next games in development, the team took the decision to port the cloth simulation to the GPU. The second part of the talk will explain in detail how the performance increased by a factor of more than 10 when entirely rewriting the cloth simulation with compute shaders on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The speaker will explain the difficulties that were overcome while working with compute shaders, the performance one can expect (real vs. theoretical), as well as what can and cannot be done with compute shaders.
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