iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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ceruleite.bsky.social @ceruleite.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Slides for SIGGRAPH 2026 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course's talk on Variable Rate Ray Tracing in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 by Michał Olejnik from Activision are now online - enjoy!! advances.realtimerendering.com/s2026/index....

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Pioneer Pretraced rayguiding! * Shoot low res rays * Spatially spread bright ray hits * Use bright rays to guide real traced rays Drastically improved directional GI quality, low cost, around 0.2-0.3ms extra Inspired by Restir, but this has 0 additional temporal lag!

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Bsky tends to remove noise from videos but i think its still visible here. A comparison of the temporal accumulation only (spatial passes disabled here for visualization purpose). Ray Redistribution On vs Off. Same performance, much better resolve with redistribution.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Adaptive ray rate per pixel! A series of compute passes distribute a fixed budget of rays over the pixels on the screen, a fixed trace dispatch goes over the final ray list and traces them. Improves disocclusions drastically. Allows way fewer (i'm using 2x fewer) rays per pixel at BETTER quality.

0.5 rays per pixel total budget, rays distributed based on need

1 ray per pixel budget, rays distributed based on pixels on need

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

NEW: Surface Detail Guiding! Analyzing surface detail (using albedo and normals, showin in the heatmap) to inform the spatial denoise passes. Flat color -> wide softer blur. Detailed surface -> smaller blur allowing sharp lighting.

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Arseny Kapoulkine @zeux.io · 30/04/2026

New blog post! In "Quantizing tangent frames", we look at various established methods to represent tangent frames in the vertex data, squeeze a few variants into 32 bits per vertex and look at the resulting precision. zeux.io/2026/04/30/q... Share, like and subscribe!

zeux.io

Quantizing tangent frames

I’ve been working on tangent space generation recently, and also pondering the tradeoffs between QTangent and normal-angle storage. So when, in a completely unrelated discussion, someone said “you cou...

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ceruleite.bsky.social @ceruleite.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games will be returning SIGGRAPH 2026... The course will be on Tuesday of SIGGRAPH, room and other details TBD. Cool talks lined up - stay tuned for more info.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

Also, ghosting, streaking, boiling and all the other common artifacts are largely gone, its very rare that such an artifact still presents itself.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

The indirect diffuse denoising now resolves very fast. Evem better since my recent refactor. Here an example of the output in movement before application of albedo (albedo detail can hide potential artifacts). Direct diffuse in the video is a separate system and not denoised, ignore its noise :).

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Testing in many different settings is very important for graphics techniques. What works in one setting will fall apart horribly in another. Usually its best to have actual game data to work with. At home i use a lot of dumb test scenes. Very happy to say the GI now works well in all of them 🥳

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

Mooore denoising tricks 😃!! I tested variance as well as ray-length guided spatial filtering. Variance guided filtering is good at preserving lighting silhouettes, while ray-length guiding adds a lot of contact hardening sharpness! 1. no guiding 2. variance guiding 3. ray-length guiding

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

More images of the improved denoiser. This showcases how much smarter the prefilter is now. Its able to keep much more lighting energy at better temporal stability. This is a better comparison than in my last post.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

I found a few tricks to make the denoiser able to handle a much sparser signal while also increasing temporal stability. With these tricks applied, indirect lighting now looks much better in dark areas. Bright small areas can not illuminate distant pixels much more accurately. Before vs After:

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

I found a bunch of new tricks for denoising. Using them, i re-architected the whole denoising pipeline. Old: prefilter -> stochastic blur -> upscale -> temporal New: prefilter -> stochastic blur -> temporal -> smooth blur -> upscale. Perf and quality are much better with the new architecture.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

I think most raytracing effects and denoisers don't really think about needs of fast games like shooters. For my RTGI denoiser, i put in a lot of care to get an immediately readable and stable image from the first frame after dis-occlusion. its very satisfying.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

My RTGI denoiser had temporal stability issues on thin geometry. While tinkering, i found two tricks to improve this significantly: 1. Based on a per pixel "thin-ness" factor, a crude blur is applied. 2. A geometric mean based firefly filter does the rest. Works much better than i expected.

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Claas Gefroi @claasgefroi.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Diese kostbaren zwei Stunden am späten Abend, wenn niemand mehr etwas von einem will und nichts mehr zu erledigen ist, wenn man tun kann, was man wirklich möchte. So müssten ganze Tage, Wochen, Jahre, Leben sein.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

I would like to showcase the denoisers improvements in movement but videos really just remove all noise so i cant really show the difference :/

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

I believe this is not done by others because it requires quite a high probe resolution to work properly without loosing too much quality. Luckily, last year i developed a self adapting sparse raytraced probe volume that can reach densities high enough to capture the world in enough detail :).

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

With my rtgi i am also doing something, that i believe, is a novel technique that i have not seen done before. While probes are often used in rtgi for indirect diffuse on hit shading, i use them to replace all rtgi hit shading. On each hit i project the closest probes radiance into the hits.

This is how the world looks when projecting the closest probes radiance onto the ray hit position.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Unfortunately the image gets denoised by the image compression quite a lot already. It is much worse noise in reality :)

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

More denoiser before and after screenshots :)

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

I have been working on a denoiser for raytraced diffuse global illumination in my hobby engine. I am now quite happy with it. It can create a high quality output with only 0.25 rays per pixel. I am particularly proud of how stable it is in movement and on disocclusions.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 30/08/2025

The radiance cache works by storing another layer of texels on the probe. The new texels store the direct radiance coming into their direction, no cos convolve. When shading rtgi ray hits, i sample the radiance of the 8 closest probes by projecting the radiance back onto the hit ws position.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 30/08/2025

Experimenting more with hybrid probe and per pixel traced gi. I now use a radiance cache to shade per pixel ray trace hits. It saves a lot of performance and the quality is very close to proper hit shading. Roughly saving ~30-70% of performance for rtgi (local lights make this verrry worthwhile).

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Started to experiment with raytraced diffuse gi. My probe GI works well but it just can not represent fine details with good performance/memory usage. AO helps it a lot i want even more. Most of the work on RTGI is denoising, very interesting work. Here the current state: Probes only vs RTGI:

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

Yoo, timberdoodle is in there. Great projects all around :)

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Molly Bangles @mollybangles.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

It’s Timberdoodle time 💛🪶🥔 American Woodcock in Bryant Park, NYC, March 2025

An American Woodcock - a mostly tan/buff colored bird with a potato-like body, very long slender beak, and large eyes - posing among the leaf litter and green ivy on the ground in Bryant Park. The bird is mostly facing the camera, head turned ever so slightly to the left.

An American Woodcock walking among the leaf litter and green ivy on the ground in Bryant Park. The skyline is reflected in their left eye.

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Alex Battaglia @dachsjaeger.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

The tech and graphical advancements in Assassin's Creed Shadows are mighty impressive: Micropolygon geometry, fluid wind simulations, ray traced global illumination and so much more. How do they all work and compare to AC games of the past? Find out in my video below! youtu.be/nhFkw5CqMN0

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Kostas Anagnostou @kostasanagnostou.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Thread divergence during constant buffer reads can have a big perf impact, this presentation discusses how to detect this on NVidia GPUs using GPU Trace and Shader profiler. Also shows how useful access to ISA is for understanding what the shader does under the hood. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSsP...

youtube.com

How to Improve Shader Performance by Resolving LDC Divergence

YouTube video by NVIDIA Game Developer

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Alex Battaglia @dachsjaeger.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

While watching all the trailers from the Sony State of Play I could not help but notice that 90% of the games shown are Unreal Engine games... with each new scene/effect/character shown it is hard not to think "that will probably stutter on PC".

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Christoph Kubisch @pixeljetstream.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

Thanks to a lot of colleagues' great work, happy to share Vulkan samples for RTX Mega Geometry. They should run on all RTX GPUs using today's new drivers github.com/nvpro-sample... github.com/nvpro-sample... github.com/nvpro-sample... github.com/nvpro-sample...

github.com

GitHub - nvpro-samples/vk_animated_clusters: Sample that uses VK_NV_cluster_acceleration_structure to animate meshes for ray tracing

Sample that uses VK_NV_cluster_acceleration_structure to animate meshes for ray tracing - nvpro-samples/vk_animated_clusters

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

One of the biggest changes and optimizations i made to my DDGI impl is how probe texels are updated. Instead of all texels looping over all rays per probe, each texel only checks out relevant rays. This is a big performance gain with high ray counts (>256) and good depth resolutions of 16x16.

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nicebyte @nicebyte.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

something I've been thinking about recently: could object-space shading be the key to mitigating artifacts from temporal techniques? accumulating data over time in "shade space" rather than camera frame that flails around. www.oxidegames.com/wp-content/u...

oxidegames.com

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Jendrik Illner @jendrikillner.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 375 - January 19th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

An update rate of 12.5% of probes a frame as well as detecting and only updating probes that are close to a surface gives a gigantic performance uplift >40x. Allows me to easily have DDGI run at under 0.3ms even tho i didnt spend more than 30 minutes optimizing. Next step is virtual probe memory.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

First experiments, using DDGI probes for specular. Made all of bistro super metallic to show the effect. I think this will work really great for rough indirect specular. It would be great if DDGI probes could replace dedicated reflection probes to some extent.

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Kostas Anagnostou @kostasanagnostou.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

A nice visualisation why using fps as a measure of performance (improvement) should be avoided. The mapping from ms to fps is not linear and the actual impact on frame time (ms) of an fps increase will depend on where in the graph (X axis) you are (from software.intel.com/content/www/...)

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Mike @teesmik.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

Albert Road Middlesbrough, mid afternoon . Life in a Northern Town. #photography #monochrome #monochromephotography #urbanphotography #thephotohour #blackandwhitephotography

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Rüm Hart @luvundlee.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

Kein Ende in Sicht. ☁️

Sicht auf eine Weide, im Vordergrund ist ein Weidezaun und ein Innendeich. Vor dem Weidezaun sind Brombeerranken, und rechts steht ein Gebüsch. In weiterer Ferne befinden sich mehrere Bäume im Nebel.

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Pannier Peter 🚲 @peter.dev · 28/12/2024

Your foggy corn

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mjp @mjp123.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

After so many years of real-time GI being a near-impossible “holy grail” of graphics, it’s a bit funny that the RTGI era has finally arrived without much fanfare. It’s also interesting that the main benefit ended up being vastly improved dev workflow as opposed to a visual quality increase.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

One of the best hobbyist engines out there.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Automatic Probe Position Refinement :OOO. Works MUCH better then i expected :D. It fixes soo many leaks and artifacts with low probe densities. Really happy with the probes now.

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Ipotrick @ipotrick.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

Using shadowmaps to calculate occlusion of probes is painful but necessary for sampling performance. I finally got rid of most leaks by implementing a bunch of biases and heuristics. Performance is much greater with shadowmaps as opposed to tracing visibility for probes now.

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