Windows 10: DirectML at GDC 2019

Brink · Mar 22, 2019

Introduction

Last year at GDC, we shared our excitement about the many possibilities for using machine learning in game development. If you’re unfamiliar with machine learning or neural networks, I strongly encourage you to check out our blog post from last year, which is a primer for many of the topics discussed in this post.

This year, we’re furthering our commitment to enable ML in games by making DirectML publicly available for the first time. We continuously engage with our customers and heard the need for a GPU-inferencing API that gives developers more control over their workloads to make integration with rendering engines easier. With DirectML, game developers write code once and their ML scenario works on all DX12-capable GPUs – a hardware agnostic solution at the operator level. We provide the consistency and performance required to integrate innovations in ML into rendering engines.

Additionally, Unity announced plans to support DirectML in their Unity Inference Engine that powers Unity ML Agents. Their decision to adopt DirectML was driven by the available hardware acceleration on Windows platforms while maintaining control of the data locality and the execution flow. By utilizing the regular graphics pipeline, they are saving on GPU stalls and have full integration with the rendering engine. Unity is in the process of integrating DirectML into their inference engine to allow developers to take advantage of metacommands and other optimizations available with DirectML.

We are very excited about our collaboration with Unity and the promise this brings to the industry. Providing developers fast inferencing across a broad set of platforms democratizes machine learning in games and improves the industry by proving out that ML can be integrated well with rendering work to enable novel experiences for gamers. With DirectML, we want to ensure that applications run well across all Windows hardware and empower developers to confidently ship machine learning models on lightweight laptops and hardcore gaming rigs alike. From a single model to a custom inference engine, DirectML will give you the most out of your hardware.

Why DirectML

Many new real-time inferencing scenarios have been introduced to the developer community over the last few years through cutting edge machine learning research. Some examples of these are super resolution, denoising, style transfer, game testing, and tools for animation and art. These models are computationally expensive but in many cases are required to run in real-time. DirectML enables these to run with high-performance by providing a wide set of optimized operators without the overhead of traditional inferencing engines.

To further enhance performance on the operators that customers need most, we work directly with hardware vendors, like Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, to directly to provide architecture-specific optimizations, called metacommands. Newer hardware provides advances in ML performance through the use of FP16 precision and designated ML space on chips. DirectML’s metacommands provide vendors a way of exposing those advantages through their drivers to a common interface. Developers save the effort of hand tuning for individual hardware but get the benefits of these innovations.

DirectML is already providing some of these performance advantages by being the underlying foundation of WinML, our high-level inferencing engine that powers applications outside of gaming, like Adobe, Photos, Office, and Intelligent Ink. The API flexes its muscles by enabling applications to run on millions of Windows devices today.

Getting Started

DirectML is available today in the Windows Insider Preview and will be available more broadly in our next release of Windows. To help developers learn this exciting new technology, we provided a few resources below, including samples that show developers how to use DirectML in real-time scenarios and exhibit our recommended best practices.

Documentation: Direct Machine Learning (DirectML) - Windows applications | Microsoft Docs

Samples: GitHub - Microsoft/DirectML-Samples: Sample code for DirectML that demonstrates how build hardware-accelerated machine learning applications.

If you were unable to attend our GDC talk this year, slides containing more in-depth information about the API and best practices will be available here in the coming days. We will be releasing the super-resolution demo featured in this deck as an open source sample, coming soon. Stay tuned to the GitHub account above.
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Source: DirectML at GDC 2019 | DirectX Developer Blog

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Brink · Mar 22, 2019

GDC 2019: Gaming for Everyone Community Events

GDC 2019 is just a few months away and Xbox is excited to return with a full week of community events for game developers, including the first ever Gaming for Everyone Community Nexus bringing many communities together in one place!

All events are free to attend with registration and tickets are available now!

Monday, March 20 at the Children’s Creativity Museum

2nd annual Gaming & Disability Community Reception, 6 p.m. – 10 p.m.

Tuesday, March 20 at Terra Gallery

19th Annual Women in Gaming Rally, 11 a.m. – 3 p.m.

Gaming for Everyone Community Nexus, 4 p.m. – 7 p.m.

Wednesday, March 21 at 111 Minna Gallery

4th Annual Celebrating Latinx in Gaming, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m.

3rd Annual LGBTQIA in Gaming Reception, 2 p.m. – 5 p.m.

14th Annual Xbox + Blacks in Gaming Green Room, 6 p.m. – 9 p.m.

Level Up your GDC experience at the Gaming for Everyone Community Nexus.

Last year we held two of our community networking events together in the same venue and the feedback was overwhelming. “More, please.” We heard you and are bringing the Gaming for Everyone Community Nexus, a place where all our developer communities can come together. Come to the Nexus to get the most out of your GDC with professional development resources. You will find organizations and resources that serve your communities and get a chance to meet members of other underrepresented communities and build stronger community ties.

More details as they become available on the event registration page.
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Source: GDC 2019: Gaming for Everyone Community EventsÂ* - Xbox Wire

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Ahhzz · Mar 22, 2019

Office 2019

Only supported on Win10. Sorry, 8.1 users, only 4 years old, gotta go.

Microsoft Office 2019 will only work on Windows 10

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com...-to-office-and-windows-servicing-and-support/

Spoiler Office 2019
Last year at Ignite, we announced Office 2019 – the next perpetual version of Office that includes apps (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and Skype for Business) and servers (including Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business). Today we’re pleased to share the following updates:

Office 2019 will ship in H2 of 2018. Previews of the new apps and servers will start shipping in the second quarter of 2018.

Office 2019 apps will be supported on:

Any supported Windows 10 SAC release

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2018

The next LTSC release of Windows Server

The Office 2019 client apps will be released with Click-to-Run installation technology only. We will not provide MSI as a deployment methodology for Office 2019 clients. We will continue to provide MSI for Office Server products.

Brink · Mar 22, 2019

Microsoft Readies for Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2018

It’s that time again. The annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) is quickly approaching March 19th, and this year Microsoft is showing up in exciting new ways to inspire and enable game developers and gamers alike to achieve more.

GDC is the place to showcase the latest technical innovations across all of Microsoft’s gaming toolset to empower developers to create great games on any platform. It’s also a place where we get the opportunity to discuss valuable feedback from our development partners to help drive innovation forward in the gaming industry. This year’s event feels especially important to us.

Over the last several years, Microsoft has been working to introduce new technology to build games faster and make it easier to scale across platforms. This year, we’re taking things a step further by bringing together the best of Microsoft’s tools, platforms, services, and more than 20 years of gaming experience in one unified presence.

Start Your Visit at the Microsoft Azure Booth

We invite you to come to the South Hall Lower Lobby of the Moscone Center and stop by our dedicated Microsoft Azure booth to learn how you can create a gaming empire by building on the gaming cloud that has powered Xbox for years.

The Azure booth will have a wide range of activities for game developers:

Come talk to experts about Azure, PlayFab, Visual Studio, App Center, Mixer, Xbox Live, Mixed Reality and more.

Visit four stations to claim a custom, free Xbox controller, and enter to win an Xbox One X daily.

Play our mixed reality game Pinball Lizard and take home the sample source code – and get the high score of the day to win an Xbox One X.

Play Darwin Project, a 10-player battle royale game that offers audience interaction through Mixer, with a shoutcaster moderating and streaming the action live.

Attend one of the many in-depth theater sessions or watch one-on-one interviews with product experts across a variety of topics, directly in the booth.

We will also host three Azure sponsored sessions at GDC that show how Next Games, Fluffy Fairy, and others build to scale with Azure and PlayFab. Come ask about our special offer of $2,500 worth of PlayFab, App Center and Azure services that are free for a year.

The entire Azure expo experience will show you what’s possible, while giving you the tools and code on how to build it.

Continue Your Learning of Our Cloud Offerings at the PlayFab Booth

Building on our efforts in the gaming cloud with Azure, in January we welcomed PlayFab to the growing slate of cloud offerings. PlayFab is a backend platform for games, delivering powerful real-time tools and services for LiveOps. With Azure and PlayFab services you concentrate on making a great game, not creating the backend. “You make it fun, we’ll make it run” we like to say.

While here, pick up a free copy of our brand new book “The PlayFab Definitive Guide to LiveOps” which gives an introduction to LiveOps, covers a detailed compendium of LiveOps techniques, and lists the LiveOps tools and services PlayFab offers.

Stop by the Xbox Lobby Bar to Check Out the Latest from ID@Xbox

ID@Xbox continues to have a significant presence at this year’s conference. At the Moscone Center, the Xbox Lobby Bar will feature hands-on gameplay with 28 highly anticipated ID@Xbox titles on Xbox One X. For a full rundown of the ID@Xbox titles available at GDC, stay tuned to Xbox Wire.

Chris Charla, Director of ID@Xbox, and the team will be onsite to talk with developers about how successful the program has been and how it continues to be a community effort, driven by passion, creativity, and the knowledge that success here unlocks huge opportunity for game studios of all sizes.

Join Us at Our Gaming for Everyone (G4E) Community Events at GDC

Gaming for Everyone is Microsoft’s commitment to make Xbox a place where everyone has fun. Each year at GDC, we host a number of important events to support these efforts.

This year we have a full week of community events.

If you’re interested in meeting others working to make gaming more accessible, come join us at the first ever Gaming & Disability reception.

We also unveiled that we are expanding the Women in Gaming (WiG) event at GDC from a luncheon to a full-day rally packed with workshops, discussions, and a reception on Tuesday, March 20. Held at the beautiful Contemporary Jewish Museum, just across the street from the Moscone Centre, we’ll host our biggest event yet in partnership with our friends from EA and Ubisoft – we expect to welcome over 800 people from the industry to this year’s WiG Rally.

We’ll also have our annual Blacks in Gaming, Latinx in Gaming, and LGBTQIA+ in Gaming events.

More details on time and location can be found here. All of these events are free to attend, and registration is open to everyone, so we hope you’ll join us.

Complete Your Learning by Attending Our Sponsored Sessions

Microsoft will be hosting 12 sponsored sessions throughout the week. Developers can learn more about:

Creating games through the ID@Xbox and Creators Programs;

using artificial intelligence to support game developers;

new APIs for developers that will give gamers higher fidelity visuals than ever before;

how to leverage Mixer’s game streaming platform to attract and engage players into your experience;

and more.

For a full list of sponsored sessions available to attend at GDC, check out the GDC Session Scheduler here.

If you are a developer and want to meet with someone from the ID@Xbox or Mixer teams, they will be on hand at their booths to schedule a meeting during the show.

GDC 2018 is gearing up to be an exciting time, and we can’t wait to share more with you at the show. Stay tuned to Xbox Wire for more details on the latest gaming news. See you at GDC.

Thanx,
Kareem
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Source: Microsoft Readies for GDC 2018 - Xbox Wire

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