F. Alan Hickman

Engineer, Advanced Prototyping Team • Collaborated directly with the GPU hardware design team and Adreno Vulkan driver team on new hardware features: mesh shading, ray tracing, and image filtering. End-to-end from silicon spec through driver implementation. • Implemented Vulkan driver support for the corresponding extensions. Technical Lead, Graphics Commercialization and Research • Designed and led development of an in-house rendering and compute engine used to prototype forward-looking algorithms and evaluate hardware features pre-silicon. • Performance analysis of workloads at the wavefront and instruction level; advised IHVs, the Adreno Vulkan driver team, and the GPU hardware team on optimization opportunities. • Taught internal courses on GPU architecture and modern rendering pipelines; mentored junior and mid-level engineers.

• Optimized the 3D renderer for embedded automotive platforms, ensuring efficient performance under strict memory and thermal constraints. • Led internal performance-engineering education initiatives, enhancing team capabilities and knowledge. • Collaborated with cross-functional teams to address latency challenges, contributing to improved product performance.

Designed and built a cross-platform engine with a wide-SIMD math library and a job-based concurrent runtime. Venture wound down in late 2015.

• Owned asset pipeline and data streaming optimization for live-service MMOs with continuous content delivery. Titles: • Neverwinter (PC) • Star Trek Online: Legacy of Romulus (PC)

• Animation, rendering, and graphics systems for mobile titles. • Memory and performance optimization against tight iOS hardware budgets Titles: • Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer (iOS) • Food Fight (iOS) • Nightfall (iOS) • Penny Arcade The Game: Gamers vs Evil (iOS) • Agricola (iOS)

• Built a concurrent renderer and real-time streaming engine across three target architectures (x86, PowerPC, Cell). • Wrote low-level systems libraries: memory management, vector math, async I/O • CPU and GPU optimization across all platforms. Titles: • Darksiders: Wrath of War (PC, Xbox 360, PS3) • Unannounced Title (PC, Xbox 360, PS3) • Vessel (PS3) • Star Raiders (PC, Xbox 360, PS3)

• Re-architected the engine renderer for concurrency on PS3, offloading culling, geometry processing, and post-processing to SPUs. • Wrote SPU-specific implementations of performance-critical rendering paths — explicit data orchestration, double-buffered DMA, local-store-resident kernels. • Owned the shadow system: shadow mapping and shadow volumes. • CPU optimizations across all platforms • Shader authoring Titles: • Saints Row (Xbox 360) • Saints Row 2 (Xbox 360, PS3) • Red Faction: Guerrilla (Xbox 360, PS3, PC) • Unannounced Title (PS2, Xbox)