Coffee, Code & Shaders: Real-Time Rendering Conversations

Today we will analyze this article written by Adrian Bentley , Director of Programming at Sucker Punch Productions , on the PlayStation blog, in which he describes the technological innovations implemented for the game Ghost of Yotei , such as improving the landscape, vegetation, weather (including snow and clouds) and the movement of its character, Atsu; in addition to the GPU compute systems and...

Today we will talk about this presentation given by Tomasz Stachowiak , half of the indie studio Pounce Light , during the Graphics Programming Conference 2025 , where he explores the different techniques they used in the engine for their game Tiny Glade , to manage running it on hardware up to 10 years old, from solving problems like shadow acne, global illumination, and depth-of-field using an e...

Today we will talk about this paper where the authors propose a method to simulate complex light interactions, focusing on the challenge of calculating global illumination using only spatial information from the scene. The main method is based on the development of a generalizable model using a transformer architecture, adapting the Point Transformer V3 network, and is capable of faithfully approx...

Today we are going to talk about the presentation given by Alex Evans of Media Molecule at SIGGRAPH 2015 , where he goes into detail about the research and development of their render system for the game Dreams . They explored various volumetric techniques, including Gigavoxels-based architecture with arduous attempts to achieve transparency using OIT methods, and despite optimizations using froxe...

Today we will discuss this presentation given by Michel Drobot of Activision Publishing during the " Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games " course at SIGGRAPH 2025 . The talk focuses on a new solution for Order-Independent Transparency (OIT) using techniques such as voxelization with rasterization and handling overflows with atomic operations to optimize performance on consoles like...

On this occasion, we will discuss this material presented by Obsidian Entertainment 's Lead Graphics Engineer, Matt Campbell , during Unreal Fest 2025 in Orlando. It is a detailed technical retrospective on the GPU optimization of the action role-playing video game  Avowed . The presentation highlights the custom modifications they implemented, such as the use of ray tracing for local lights a...

Today we will talk about this small article published on the  Guild Wars 2  website, which details the improvements to the shadow technology implemented in the  Visions of Eternity  expansion, seeking to increase both the  coverage  and the detail of the dynamic shadows, taking advantage of the advancements in graphic hardware. Read full article here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/improved-sh...

Today, we will talk about an article written by  Arseny Kapoulkine  (creator of  MeshOptimizer ) regarding the process he followed to optimize the processing pipeline for the geometry of NVIDIA 's Zorah scene, which has billions of triangles and weighs up to 32 GB. In the article, he discusses the challenges of implementing a hierarchical LOD by clusters, similar to Unreal Engine's Nanite,...

On this occasion we will discuss an NVIDIA article where  Billy Khan , director of engine technology at ID Software , focuses on how the integration of Path-Tracing in the game  DOOM: The Dark Ages  achieves more physically accurate lighting, softer shadows, and better reflections than traditional Ray-Tracing; he also highlights the advantages of using the DLSS 4 transformation model for super-res...

Today we will talk about this paper that was presented at EUROGRAPHICS 2022, by Basile Fraboni, Antoine Webanck, Nicolas Bonneel, and Jean-Claude Iehl, from INSA Lyon and Univ Lyon. In it, they propose a new method for efficiently rendering volumetric effects like clouds or smoke in cases where sequences of frames (or multiple camera views) are needed, in which they reuse light paths across differ...

On this occasion we will talk about this presentation given by Melino Conte and Luc Leblanc from Ubisoft Montreal during SIGGRAPH 2025 , in which they discuss the solution they developed for global illumination within their Anvil Engine for Assassin's Creed Shadows , supporting a dynamic and large-scale open world, delving into the decisions they made, as well as the reasoning behind them, and...

Today we're going to talk about this presentation by Will Piece , Senior Graphics Programmer at Blizzard Entertainment , that he gave at REAC 2025 ; where he details the transition of their previous GI solution to a new baked Deep Dynamic Global Illumination (DDGI) approach, which brings scalability across a wide range of hardware and streamlines artists workflows by using a vlume-based system...

Today we're going to analyze this presentation by Wessel Mast, from Guerrilla Games, during Dev GAMM Game Conference 2024, where he explains the UI framework they developed for games like Horizon Forbidden West, in which they render the whole UI in only one draw-call using Signed Distance Fields (SDFs) and Tile-Based Rendernig to achieve drawing complex UI in under 16 milliseconds. Watch full...

Today we're going to discuss about this presentation given by Navjot Garg, Kleber Garcia and Darrin Stewart from Electronic Arts at RACT 2025; focusing on the challenges and architectural decisions behind global illumination, ray-tracing and character creation for the game Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Watch full presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHflToAhEs8 Original Copyright Fr...

Today we're going to dive into a talk by Lukas Feller, Graphics Programmer of King Games, focusing on the development of volumetric fog effects used in the game Enshrouded; explaining an initial failed attempt using MSAA and the successful second one using TAA, inspired by techniques from games like Read Dead Redemption 2 and the Forstbite engine. Watch full presentation here: https://www.yout...

Today we're going to discuss about this presentation by alexander Gesi, Graphics Programmer of 4A Engine, during REAC 2024; where he explains the improvements made to the rendering engine for Metro Exudus. The discussion focuses on modern approaches like bindless resource models and efficient texture and geometry streaming to support demanding features such as rat-tracing, as well as the custo...

Today we're going to talk about this paper presented during High-Performance Graphics 20025, by Bastian Kuth, Carsten Faber, Seyedmasih Tabaei y Quirin Meyer de la Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts, as well as Max Oberberger, Pirmin Pfeifer y Domink Baumeister from AMD, where they introduce a nover procedural system to create and render trees exclusively on GPU using Work Graphs and M...

Today we're going to talk about this presentation by Sergei Kulikov from Machine Games at SIGGRAPH 2025 , where he details the hair rendering system implementation for the game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle , keeping the 60 FPS target, using asynchronous compute and LOD management to limit segment count to maximum 2 million. Read full presentaion: https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2...

On this occation we're going to talk about this paper by Eugene D'Leon and Benedikt Bitterli from NVIDIA as well as Dario Seyb and Wojciech Jarosz from Dartmouth College , presenting a unified theory of light transport using Stochastic Implicit Surfaces, specifically focusing on Gaussian Process Implicit Surfaces (GPIS); avoiding the usual separation of scenes en either deterministic surfa...

In this session, we will analyze a paper by Jaime Postmouth, Peter Kuts, and Stephen Hill, in which they present a new bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) based on Oren–Nayar, but energy-preserving. They also introduce a sophisticated importance sampling scheme called CLTC, which drastically reduces variance in ray tracing. Read full paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18026...

Today we’ll be talking about the presentation given by Peter Shirley from Activision at High Performance Graphics 2025 . In it, he discussed the use of exponential Spherical Harmonics to replace the Split-Sum method, by re-encoding the environment map with a view-dependent factorization. This approach removes the need for a multi-level cube map, saving disk space and making the process noticeably...

On this occasion, we will discuss about the presentation by Eric Wohllaib , Graphics Programmer at Sucker Punch Productions , gave at te Game Developers Conference , about how the procedural grass system implemented for the game Ghost of Tsushima was developed using Compute Shaders and Bézier Curves—covering everything from instance data generation and level-of-detail management, to the unified wi...

Join us in this talk where we will discuss the presentation given by Kentaro Suzuki, Kenichiro Yasutomi, and Hajime Uchimura from Polyphony Digital during SIGGRAPH 2025 , where they delve into the meticulous approach to rendering car materials used in Gran Turismo 7 . Since they often go beyond the Rec. 709 standard, they require wide color gamut rendering and adaptive tone mapping for HDR display...

Today we will discuss the talk given by Angelo Pesce from Roblox at High-Performance Graphics 2025, where he explores the landscape of real-time rendering, particularly within the video game industry. He evaluates how the approach to video game development has changed to date and analyzes the opportunities and challenges of emerging technologies, such as Generative AI, Cloud Computing, and others....

This time we're going to talk about this article by Jarkko Lempiainen , from HypeHype Games , where he details the development of a new stochastic lighting algorithm for the HypeHype user-generated content platform, designed to efficiently implement dynamic local lights and shadows on a wide range of mobile devices; which needed to be scalable and intuitive for non-technical users like kids, a...