Meltdown 2003

One of the more technical DirectX conferences is Microsoft’s own Meltdown (July 16, 17 in Seattle or July 29, 30 in London) and is a premier chance to learn from the DirectX team directly. If you don’t get a chance to attend any of the other conferences and are interested in learning some hard-core DirectX programming then you really can’t beat Meltdown. Learn more about it here. Meltdown covers all aspects, from shader programming to QA’ing DirectX apps, including the test suites, where you can bring your code and run it on the latest GPUs and CPUs and talk to the engineers about how to optimize your software. If you’re just interested in graphics, however, you might want to wait till ATI & NVIDIA hold their own mini-conferences (typically in California and England). The European Meltdown is inconveniently concurrent with Siggraph this year. There’s a discount for early registration, so don’t dawdle.