Heres some basic stuff that Microsoft has been doing with the Xbox 360 to improve performance and make game development easier.
Xbox 360 Compiler and PgoLite Update:
The Xbox 360 compiler has changed dramatically in the last year, which changes the rules for how to write efficient Xbox 360 code. Many of the improvements automatically make your code faster, but others require you to change your code in order to reap the benefits. PgoLite has also improved and should be used differently, to get even better results. This talk summarizes the past year's developments, and gives simple rules for how to get maximum benefit from the changes.
New CPU Features in the XDK:
The tools in the XDK continue to improve. New profiling features make it easier to find out where time is being wasted in your code, and lock-free primitives make efficient multithreaded code easier to write. The talk covers enhancements to trace analysis, CPU performance counters, system monitor, and timing captures, and discusses how to use LockFreePipe and XMCore.
Microsoft Directions in Parallel Computing and Some Short Term Help:
This talk focuses on the native task scheduler being announced by the Parallel Computing Platform group in Microsoft this spring and offerings that are available in the XDK. The scheduling of tasks within games can improve resource utilization, load balancing, and performance. For games targeting the current generation of PCs and the Xbox 360 console, we discuss an interim solution. Previous talks given on this topic laid the foundation for using tasks to move work required by the engine from an over-utilized hardware core to an underutilized core. A progression of task and scheduler designs is presented that start with simple implementations and move to more complex designs that have low-overhead. The simple implementations are satisfactory for a small number of tasks but impose a prohibitive amount of overhead when the number of tasks grows. Finally, we present the work-stealing algorithm that pulls work from one core to another in the low-overhead scheduler.
Multi-Threaded Rendering for Games:
One core is just not enough for graphics anymore—rendering tasks often have to run in parallel to hit the target framerate and hide latent operations. This talk includes best practices, pitfalls to avoid, and a range of design patterns for implementing multithreaded rendering on today’s platforms, including Direct3D 10 and Xbox 360. We cover everything from batch submission to resource management and discuss future plans for greater flexibility and higher performance when rendering on multiple threads.
Direct3D Samples Update:
Come see the latest developments from the DirectX and Xbox 360 samples team. This presentation is a deep-dive into the inner workings of recent and upcoming graphics samples in the DirectX SDK and Xbox 360 XDK. Techniques discussed include deferred particle rendering, Xbox 360 geometry instancing, edge-based antialiasing, and more.
At Least We Aren’t Doing That: Real Life Performance Pitfalls
Allan Murphy
As we move towards second and third generation Xbox 360 games, the majority of titles are CPU, rather than GPU bound. This presentation draws on the unique perspective of Microsoft’s XDC proactive engineering group to present an across the board survey of the CPU performance issues even the very best developers run into, how you can find those problems, and how you can fix them. Applicable primarily to Xbox 360, this set of mini-case studies forms a next-gen post-mortem that will help developers decide where to focus optimization effort, and ultimately, reassure you that you’re going the right way.
Links to a lot of presentations for the Xbox 360/PC
Tease.
44.2 M 
27.1 M 
20.8 M
