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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Shears - Squeeze the Juice Out of the CPUs: Post Mortem of a Data-Driven Scheduler
Speaker(s): Michael Lavaire, Remi Quenin
Company Name(s): Ubisoft Entertainment, Ubisoft Entertainment
Track / Format: Programming

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Overview: These days concurrent programming is mandatory for game developers. Use of synchronization primitives is often a solid way to achieve the goal but it has its drawback. This talk presents an innovative way to schedule an engine loop by working around data contention in a multithreaded environment. This data-driven scheduling minimizes data races and maximizes hardware occupation including Cell's SPUs. Implemented using lock-free algorithms, it achieves better performance compared to more traditional schedulers. By the way, did you know that SPU programming can be easy?

GDC 2010

Michael Lavaire

Ubisoft Entertainment

Remi Quenin

Ubisoft Entertainment

free content

Programming

Programming