Did you guys go to GDC? I live an hour away but couldn't spare a thousand bucks
Still, a lot of people put their presentations online. Things like DICE's http://zigguratvertigo.com/2011/03/07/gdc-2011-approximating-translucency-for-a-fast-cheap-and-convincing-subsurface-scattering-look/ technique look awesome, and I'm looking forward to Bungie's stuff on dynamic impostor generation.
Of course with papers online I can see stuff from multiple conferences! If anyone ever hacks Oblivion enough to get a cascaded shadow map going I'm hoping http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2011/bittner-2011-scc/ relatively straightforward shadow map culling paper will help with performance. Of course there's also http://visual-computing.intel-research.net/art/publications/sdsm/ but that seems a tad more complicated.
Also, I heard that there was more press and game showing than ever this GDC, what was that like?