iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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JMS55 @jms5517.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

New blog post! Go read about making ReSTIR better, killing ReSTIR, improving denoising, and more! jms55.github.io/posts/2026-0...

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Taken in Kyrgyzstan on a trip with two friends, 2023. I don't plan to post much of my photography on Bluesky, but this is the first photo I've edited in a few years. I'm on a personal sabbatical right now, so I have a bit more free time to go through the backlog.

Yellow flowers in the foreground, at a high viewpoint that shows a snaking river valley leading to tall glaciated white mountain peaks in the distance. Kyrgyzstan.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Over the past few years, it’s become clear to me that there were three graphics papers in the past few years that truly revolutionized their subfields: 3D Gaussian Splatting by Kerbl et al 2023, Monte Carlo Geometry Processing by Sawhney/Crane 2020, and ReSTIR by Bitterli et al 2020.

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Hopefully one last SIGGRAPH advertisement. I, myself, yours truly, will present on Haolin's behalf a data-driven method for joint adaptive sampling and quadrature for integration. Wed R408A. In the end of the talk I'll argue why everyone is doing the wrong thing. Paper: suikasibyl.github.io/nqr

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Jacco Bikker 🎦 @jbikker.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

TinyBVH has just been 𝘂𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝟭.𝟴.𝟬. For CPU ray tracing, it is now the fastest option in most cases - Outperforming Intel Embree and Madmann91 for BVH build time and single-ray performance. On GPU, performance exceeds 4B rays per second - 4 rays per pixel at 4k/120Hz. github.com/jbikker/tiny...

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mmalex @mmalex.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

my #1 grizzly beard protip for (game) dev is: if you have a bug that you dont understand the cause of immediately, dont try to fix it; add & iterate visualization / inspection tools until the cause is plain to see. the accumulation of 'observability' in your system's state will pay off many times

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

In this thread: three cool rendering papers that DisneyResearch|Studios is publishing at EGSR this week. The authors of these papers are peers that I get the privilege of working closely with frequently, and these are projects I've been excited to watch develop! (1/17)

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Jiayin Cao @jiayincao.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I'm happy to share my latest blog post. In this post, I document how I implemented forward-mode automatic differentiation in my custom shading language and used it to drive mipmap selection in my offline renderer. agraphicsguynotes.com/posts/proced...

agraphicsguynotes.com

Procedural UV Derivatives Evaluation in SORT Renderer

In this post, I want to talk about a topic I have been meaning to write about for quite a few years: texture UV derivatives evaluation in my offline renderer, SORT (Simple Open Source Ray Tracer), whi...

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

There's a new paper out in JCGT by @jamportz.bsky.social et al. that proposes a super simple modification of existing microfacet models to implement a retroreflection model. What's interesting is that although insanely simple, the model fits measured data pretty well! jcgt.org/published/00...

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Not only a very cool technique, but first authored by a high school student!

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nicebyte @nicebyte.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

INTRODUCTION TO SPHERICAL HARMONICS FOR GRAPHICS PROGRAMMERS finally done. gpfault.net/posts/sph.html

gpfault.net

Introduction to Spherical Harmonics for Graphics Programmers

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Jeremy Laumon @jeremy.laumon.name · 13/03/2026

Ahhh Debug Break can be disabled at the PSO level so the driver can effectively optimize them out of they're disabled, that's cool! And I can them them on "at runtime" without re-compiling the shader from source at least!

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Pablo Zurita @pzurita.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

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...

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

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

I want to do a chain of down sampling using a 6x6 kernel (say, for bloom), representable with 13 bilinear taps. Is it faster to do A) single-pass compute shader (with UAV and globallycoherent), but full manual blending, or B) multiple passes, using a sampler with bilinear interpolation?

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

If you haven't seen the HDR debate between Timothy Lottes and Filippo Tarpini (mostly on the other site), it's very interesting! Article: share.google/SlH7YI6l8Cc1... Response: youtu.be/OXpLF69jPhI?... Rebuttal: (attached image from the other site) Second Response: youtu.be/hzOkBfwEruI?...

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

This is one of the better general write-ups of CPU perf optimization that I've seen: abseil.io/fast/hints.h...

abseil.io

abseil / Performance Hints

An open-source collection of core C++ library code

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Way to generate a random integer in the range [0,N) without *usually* using an integer division (which rejection sampling does): lemire.me/blog/2019/06... And a nice explanation here: jacquesheunis.com/post/bounded...

jacquesheunis.com

Generating integers uniformly distributed over an range

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Sebastian Aaltonen @sebaaltonen.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

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".

sebastianaaltonen.com

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...

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Lots and lots of good observations in both of these.

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Pekka Väänänen @pekkavaa.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

New article on my site: Better sRGB to greyscale conversion The commonly used greyscale formula is slightly off when computed in gamma space but can it be fixed? 📜 30fps.net/pages/better...

A four-pane comparison of different formulas for greyscale conversion.
Top row: Linear sRGB (the correct way to do it), Gamma sRGB (the somewhat wrong "luma" formula).
Bottom row: CIELAB L* (a high quality option), and the new alternative gamma-space version.

Careful inspection shows the "Gamma sRGB" case is slightly dimmer at points than the others.

A quote from “Principles of Digital Image Processing” by Wilhelm Burger and Mark J. Burge. It shows weights that are a better fit for gamma-space greyscale conversion.

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

For anyone who's tried to use spherical harmonics for lighting and found the notation- and terminology- heavy definitions confusing, highly recommend this classic: grahamhazel.com/blog/2017/12... I think Graham Hazel's blog was down for a long time, years maybe, but works now!

grahamhazel.com

Alternative definition of Spherical Harmonics for Lighting – Graham Hazel

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Baptiste GENEST @baptiste-genest.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

Computing the exact bijection of the optimal transport (OT) problem between very large point sets is completely untractable… In our SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 paper: “BSP-OT: Sparse transport plans between discrete measures in log-linear time” we get one with typically 1% of error in a few seconds on CPU!

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mjp @mjp123.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

I've got a new blog post for all of you fine folks! It runs through the additions to D3D12 since it was released, and finishes up with some of the things that have changed for me personally in my code. (And yes it's really been 10 years 👴). therealmjp.github.io/posts/ten-ye...

therealmjp.github.io

Ten Years of D3D12

For those of us that have been using it from the start, it can be hard to believe that Direct3D 12 has been around for nearly ten years now. Windows 10 was released on July 29th 2015, and D3D12 has be...

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

Highly recommend Peter Shirley's presentation of "Spherical Harmonic Exponentials for Efficient Glossy Reflections". As always, he makes notation-heavy math way more accessible, and it's an amazing technique: youtu.be/jN7FX5COASM?...

youtu.be

Spherical Harmonic Exponentials for Efficient Glossy Reflections

YouTube video by High-Performance Graphics

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Kostas Anagnostou @kostasanagnostou.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Great Siggraph 2025 presentation of Gran Turismo's tonemapping pipeline, which also includes a fantastic introduction to light perception and tonemapping, its origins and how it evolved over the years with display technology, recommended read: blog.selfshadow.com/publications...

blog.selfshadow.com

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Kostas Anagnostou @kostasanagnostou.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

"Hallucinations on the future of real-time rendering", High Performance Graphics 2025 keynote: c0de517e.com/023_hpg.htm

c0de517e.com

Hallucinations on the future of real-time rendering.

Angelo Pesce's homepage & blog on computers, graphics and other things.

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

Always a great reference for generating an orthonormal basis from a unit vector: jcgt.org/published/00...

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

At SIGGRAPH 2025, Intel, Disney, & Chaos are doing a course on the nitty gritty details of implementing path guiding methods in 3 production renderers: Cycles, Hyperion, and Corona. I helped write the course notes: 80 pages of great stuff! Coming soon. s2025.conference-schedule.org/presentation...

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Found this cool blog post explaining one way to optimize integer divisions by a constant divisor: ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/l... Could be useful for a lot of things. Eg hash-map with a prime number of entries, do the precomputation on initialization.

ridiculousfish.com

Labor of Division (Episode I)

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Christoph Peters @momentsingraphics.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

All HPG 2025 papers are now available on the EG digital library. CGF papers: diglib.eg.org/handle/10.23... Conference papers: diglib.eg.org/handle/10.23... It has been a huge honor to act as HPG papers chair and guest editor and I look forward to an exciting program in Copenhagen.

diglib.eg.org

44-Issue 8

High-Performance Graphics 2025

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Alan Wolfe @demofox.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

Gigi Version 1.0.0 released! This includes WebGPU code generation, and the dx12 preview feature cooperative vectors. A gallery of a few Gigi techniques that you can run in your browser: electronicarts.github.io/gigi/ Gigi: github.com/electronicar...

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Selena Ling @selenaling.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Our #SGP25 work studies a simple and effective way to uniformly sample implicit surfaces by casting rays. (1/9) “Uniform Sampling of Surfaces by Casting Rays” w/ @abhishekmadan.bsky.social @nmwsharp.bsky.social and Alec Jacobson

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

Such as a simple and useful technique for uniformly sampling points on a surface, can't believe it hasn't been published before: www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.05268 In short: pick a random ray direction. Then pick a random 2D origin in the normal plane. Trace the ray, and return *all* intersections.

arxiv.org

Uniform Sampling of Surfaces by Casting Rays

Randomly sampling points on surfaces is an essential operation in geometry processing. This sampling is computationally straightforward on explicit meshes, but it is much more difficult on other shape...

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

With @briankaris.bsky.social winning this year’s SIGGRAPH Practitioner award, it’s a great time to repost his HPG 2022 keynote, which is one of the best talks I’ve ever seen. The tech is cool, yes, but what makes the talk is Brian’s approach to R&D and invention. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRnj...

youtube.com

HPG 2022 Keynote: The Journey to Nanite - Brian Karis, Epic Games

YouTube video by High-Performance Graphics

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JCGT announcements @handle.invalid · 09/05/2025

Alan Wolfe, William Donnelly, and Henrik Halén, Importance-Sampled Filter-Adapted Spatio-Temporal Sampling jcgt.org/published/00...

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Ian Holstead @ianholstead.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

I'm speaking at @officialgdc.bsky.social this year! Want to learn about the tech used to ship Alter? Don't let the title scare you, this isn't a technical navmesh talk, in fact you might find it the most interesting if you've never used navmesh before! schedule.gdconf.com/session/apex... #GDC2025

schedule.gdconf.com

'Apex Legends': Preventing Exploits and Shipping Risky Features Using... NavMesh??

19th March, 2025 03:30pm - 04:30pm - Apex Legends’ 26th Legend presented a significant technical challenge; one of her abilities all...

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mjp @mjp123.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

JCGT announcements are now on BlueSky: bsky.app/profile/jcgt...

bsky.app

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Haven't seen anyone post this talk and I thought it was unusually clear on some of the topics. First half is basically about reducing loading hitches, second half about moving to modern GPU-driven rendering, useful even if you're not working with Unreal. youtu.be/WGv_BjxvJ8M?...

youtu.be

A Taste of Chocolate: Adding a Rendering Fast Path without Breaking Unreal Engine | Unreal Fest 2024

YouTube video by Unreal Engine

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Andrew Helmer @andrewhelmer.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Game engine programmer: alignment padding

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