iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Came across a very thin lightshaft while on a walk. Absolutely love the caustics above and below the water surface.

Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

imo fps serves as a final target, but not a valid performance metric. Same way you can say a car can go up to x km/h, but we measure the cost of driving at that speed in more appropriate terms such a L/100km. Same applies here, FPS for final output, μs for cost.

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

hopefully the quotes in that message convey my disdain for those performance reports since they are not based on a good measurement at all.

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Anecdote, I am sent "detailed performance reports" on rendering changes from the tech artists, and it's always measured in fps. They run at a capped fps when testing. Hopefully one of these days I'll get a report listing microseconds instead of fps, but it's a long road to get this changed.

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

If I may extend this question, in case you touch everyone's code, how do you ensure people understand and learn from the why and how, to improve performance understanding across the studio?

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

Meanwhile in Mitte it gave the most Death Star looking version of the Fernsehturm.

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Quality video, loved every bit of it. Not sure if you stumbled on this while researching, but none the less recommend browsing the Game UI Database. It doesn't cover everything out there, but still gives you a great overview over many years.

gameuidatabase.com

Game UI Database

The ultimate tool for Game UI and Interface designers. Explore over 1,300 games and 55,000 UI screenshots. Browse and filter by category, animation, colour, material, layout, game genre, and more.

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

A quote that still keeps me awake, "Don't call them game engines. Unreal and Unity are like advanced UI toolkits." Followed with a questioning rant from my side asking how they could possibly see physics, wind, etc as UI toolkit related. The whole "engine Y for Industry" license is to blame imo.

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Also, for those that have a good offer open to them to take a super-long-unknown-duration-sabatical from game dev, maybe worth thinking about it for the next few years

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Pff, we worked together. You toooootally weren't the kindest most chill person every that was a pleasure to work with. But you tooooootally were a gym chad macho bruv. 😉

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

You can sit in a car for a moment and very quickly realize just how much isn't just the compositor blitting a bunch of icons.

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Got to be vague for obvious reasons. Those mountains are not flat images. Neither are the tubes and needles on the driver display. Each screen also has a mix of renderers layered on top of each other. Also, the driver display has stereoscopic rendering that is based on your head position.

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Aside from that, amazing week and looking forward to the next edition.

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Looking back to a fun week at the Graphics Programming Conference, one clear pattern whenever socializing with new folks emerged, everyone was both amazed but also horrified to an extent hearing about all the realtime 3D being done in recent cars and their respective systems.

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Hey I'm Tom, Expert Engineer/System Architect for rendering at Mercedes-Benz. Worked on things like Need For Speed, Sniper Elite and Forza. You may have bumped into me at the Graphics Programming Conference or some other one.

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

The entire site started to feel like we were on a subreddit dedicated to that individual. Strange. Anyway, on to more interesting and fun things here instead

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

Still got 3, I’ll dm you on Twitter

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 17/10/2023

Or, in my case “guess I’ll go on this elaborate walk that conveniently passes by my favourite French pastry bakery”. At least it helps get the steps in between meetings.

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Tom E. @flyingthread.bsky.social · 09/10/2023

One of the most shocking things to see outside of games is people treating engines as “just a renderer” that can easily run 20 times side by side on embedded systems.

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