GDC 2010: Rendering With Conviction
One of the good talks I saw at GDC was this one, Rendering With Conviction. Stephen Hill posted his slides for his presentation and you should check them out if you’re interested. The talk covers some cool tricks they used for Splinter Cell: Conviction. A hierarchical z buffer approach to culling geometry when rendering, and ambient occlusion without the nasty halo effects you typically see in standard SSAO approaches.