INTRODUCTION TO SPHERICAL HARMONICS FOR GRAPHICS PROGRAMMERS

finally done.

gpfault.net/posts/sph.html

meshoptimizer 1.1 is out!

github.com/zeux/meshopt...

Featuring two new major features, meshlet topology compression and opacity micromaps, as well as a few smaller features and improvements! More information in the infographic and release above :)

Boosts and repository stars are welcome!

image showing demo tracker in use, in an obvious case where one program is using more GPU than the machine has.

I am not sure I can overstate how useful this tool is. Not sure if your game is paging out GPU-memory to system-memory? Well now you know :)

github.com/jonasmr/demo...

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics
ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

I have a brand spanking new "Loose Lexer/Parser" for C++ that can pull an entire AST from large code bases orders of magnitude faster than a compiler can. Got some good uses for that coming up!😍

Nanite + Reyes Let's get into the details of how this integrates with Nanite. We aren’t replacing anything Nanite already does. Nothing is changed about th...

2 more Nanite Tessellation posts are up. graphicrants.blogspot.com/2026/02/nani...,
graphicrants.blogspot.com/2026/03/vari...

Another experimental custom vfx volume modifier for meshes + custom particle processor.

selective particle emission + light on any mesh shape by intersecting the modifier volume sdf w/ random ptx spawn points on geometry data fetched in particle processor

#gamedev #godotengine #vfx #rtvfx #wip

Visibility Buffer and Deferred Rendering in DOOM: The Dark Ages YouTube video by Graphics Programming Conference

Our GPC 2025 talks are up on YT now!
youtu.be/fXakIV1OFes?...

youtu.be/mvCoqCic3nE?...

Screenshot showing skin with micro-occlusion at the top, and micro-shadowing below.

I finally wrapped up the second post on the series about micro-shadowing. On this one I go over a basic approach based on a microsurface, and I show results for different materials and lighting conditions.

irradiance.ca/posts/micros...

FASTBuild v1.19 has been released, including:
* LightCache supports Clang & GCC for significantly faster cache operations
* Support for Ctrl+F7 integration with Visual Studio
* BFF syntax enhancements
* Bug fixes
Details: http://
fastbuild.org/docs/changelog.html Big thanks to all contributors!

Forget Superresolution, Sample Adaptively (when Path Tracing) Real-time path tracing increasingly operates under extremely low sampling budgets, often below one sample per pixel, as rendering complexity, resolution, and frame-rate requirements continue to rise. ...

Interesting paper showing great results for replacing standard low-res rendering + temporal upsampling (DLSS) with high-res GBuffer + adaptive sampling. Makes sense given rising costs of lighting computations vs GBuffer. arxiv.org/abs/2602.08642

I have procrastinated on writing so much that I wrote an entire document on writing tips: cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/writin...
Probably not much is new but I find I still need to repeat the same things to my students regularly. Will update this document over time hopefully.

GitHub - pm4rtx/Unity-FrustumCulling: An example frustum culling implemented using Unity Burst compiler and native plugin An example frustum culling implemented using Unity Burst compiler and native plugin - pm4rtx/Unity-FrustumCulling

There’s also so called AoSoA layout which has benefits of the both (and some GPUs support that 10+ years but APIs never exposed). An example of AoSoA use on CPU also shows pretty solid perf (e.g. : github.com/pm4rtx/Unity...)

this point came up in a discussion some months ago which made me realize that supporting proper lambdas in hlsl would mean this "anyhit shader" logic could be passed in as lambda and inlined with the "hidden" code that does bvh traversal. maybe that'll happen some day..

Nanite Tessellation Nanite Tessellation, aka Nanite Dynamic Tessellation, aka Nanite Dynamic Displacement was the next major feature I worked on after Nanite it...

I'm finally writing up how Nanite Tessellation works. The first few blogs posts are up. More will be coming.
graphicrants.blogspot.com/2026/02/nani...

Original: an old photo I took in the forest

3D voxelized scene in the day.

3D voxelized scene in the night.

3D voxelized scene in the day with volumetric fog.

This was a fun quick experiment:
Using an old photo I took in the forest, I used ml-sharp to generate gaussian splats from it, voxelized it in my toy renderer, relit the scene dramatically.
#rendeting #metalrt

“Floating-Point Printing and Parsing Can Be Simple And Fast”

The fastest known floating-point printer and parsing algorithms - fixed-width printing, shortest-width printing, and parsing, all in 400 lines of Go.

research.swtch.com/fp
research.swtch.com/fp-proof

Optimizing spatiotemporal variance-guided filtering for modern GPU architectures jcgt.org/published/00...

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/novelt...
I gave an internal talk at UCSD last year regarding "novelty" in computer science research. In it I "debunked" some of the myth people seem to have about what is good research in computer science these days. People seemed to like it, so I thought I should share.

A strand based hair simulation running on GPU YouTube video by Jorrit Rouwe

A sneak peak of what I've been working on: A strand based hair system for Jolt Physics (WIP): youtu.be/Rl19G0c003o

-- JOB SEARCH POST/RT APPRECIATED --
Hello everyone!

I am available for work (full time position/internship) anywhere in the world with priority going to the EU, starting June 2026. 🧵

My "How to Vulkan in 2026" @vulkan.org #Vulkan guide is now publicly available at www.howtovulkan.com

I still consider it a preview, though I'm mostly happy with it and only plan on changing minor things and incorporating some feedback.

Meshlet Rendering on Voodoo 2 YouTube video by Mustafa Korkmaz

As my holiday project, I went back to my retro engine project after a long time. Decided to add something modern, so here's meshlet rendering on Voodoo 2:
youtu.be/VOv8JqUZstQ

"An Experimental Approach to printf in HLSL" from the one and only
www.abolishcrlf.org/2025/12/31/P...

SIGGRAPH 2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games: Fast as Hell: idTech8 Global Illumination YouTube video by SIGGRAPH Advances in Real-Time Rendering

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course talk recording of "FAST AS HELL: IDTECH8 GLOBAL ILLUMINATION" by @idsoftwaretiago.bsky.social from id Software is now online: youtu.be/VTrdeqMMMK0?... Enjoy!

SIGGRAPH 2025 Advances in RT Rendering: Megalights: Stochastic Direct Lighting in Unreal Engine 5 YouTube video by SIGGRAPH Advances in Real-Time Rendering

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course talk recording of "MEGALIGHTS: STOCHASTIC DIRECT LIGHTING IN UNREAL ENGINE 5" by @knarkowicz.bsky.social‬
and @tiagocostav.bsky.social‬ from @epicgames.alt.store.ap.brid.gy is now online: youtu.be/dmmN8_c8Tb0?... Enjoy!

I wrote a blog post describing state of GPU market and what does it mean for support of new GPU features
asawicki.info/articles/sta...
Thanks to @asawicki.info for letting me publish on his blog

Screenshot of the blog post.

I got the first post about direct lighting material occlusion up on my blog. On this one I go over the commonly used micro-occlusion approach and its limitations, and I start digging into micro-shadowing as an improvement.

irradiance.ca/posts/micros...

No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve pe...

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :)
www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap...

I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".