When Bungie contracted Certain Affinity to help with Halo: The Master Chief Collection, the studio was beyond excited. However after receiving a non-negotiable mandate that the game run at 60 fps, the pressure was on. But Certain Affinity's lead technical artist Bryan Moss is a performance guy, and he understood the importance of making that goal.
In this GDC 2015 session, Moss breaks down the role of a technical artist, discussing their involvement with designers and artists during production of a multiplayer map. When it's time to optimize and manage framerate, they'll pop over to QA and troubleshoot to fix problem areas.
His talk points out what can cause the CPU to stall (like animations or poor occlusion culling) and he analyzes the design of the multiplayer map Bloodline, which he describes as their "worst case scenario" for its extremely long draw distances and multiple vehicle types.
Technical artists and animators interested in learning about the development pipeline Certain Affinity followed can watch it completely free via the official GDC YouTube channel!
About the GDC Vault
In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.
Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.
Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas