Krzysztof Narkowicz

I recommend just reading the slides. After the talk, we filled the presenter notes with more information than we could fit in our live talk.

It was recorded, so at some point it should be available on the ACM website.

MegaLights slides were just posted online. There's a bunch of details in slide notes if you're curious how our new Stochastic Direct Lighting solution works, why we made it and want to learn a bit about the problem space.

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course slides for "MegaLights: Stochastic Direct Lighting in Unreal Engine 5” talk by @knarkowicz.bsky.social and @tiagocostav.bsky.social from Epic Games are now online
advances.realtimerendering.com/s2025/index....

Thank you @ceruleite.bsky.social for 20 years of organizing the Adavances course. I did learn a lot from it over the years. And also for a really well chosen speaker swag :)

It's time to share the program for the 2025 Advances in Real-time Rendering in Games.

Check out all the details here: advances.realtimerendering.com/s2025/index....

and, of course, come attend the course live on Tuesday August 12 at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver!

We use a similar technique in UE, but using cheap AO derived from the distance fields, which then artists use to modify materials in material shaders. Though it's much less powerful - more like a procedural scene-aware texturing than a mesh blend system.

YouTube video by High-Performance Graphics The Future of Analytical Materials in a Neural World

Amazing talk about Neural Materials. Lots of insight - from why layered materials are important to an overview of current neural solutions and their tradeoffs: youtu.be/xUnXPNFWJUY?...

My feeling is that 20y ago there was a huge barrier to start, but if you could land a publishing deal (even on Steam) your game would at least recoup a large part of the budget. Nowadays the risk is much higher.

It's very simple. One is checkerboarding and the other one is half/quater res.

Well, it's more like "Go, go, go, fuck (KURWAAA), police" :)

Great to see you getting this award and certainly well deserved!

It's designed for run time compression (e.g. real-time captured env maps), so quality isn't the best. If you can compress those offline then likely Compressonator would be a better choice.

I imagine dynamic register allocation is also quite useful on DXR 1.0, as on hit you need to evaluate materials and they can have highly variable complexity. At least in the future, as for now it seems like everyone is either simplifying or caching materials for perf reasons.

It reminds me of FMV games, which were a cool idea, but it also was a dead end due to various limitations of the tech.

Another great article from Chips and Cheese. This time about dynamic RDNA4 register allocation. Having full dynamic allocation would be huge for all those complex shaders we write nowadays, but as the article shows it's not easy to get there.

Measuring acceleration structures Hardware accelerated raytracing, as supported by DirectX 12 and Vulkan, relies on an abstract data structure that stores scene geometry, known as “acceleration structure” and often referred to as “BVH...

New blog post! "Measuring acceleration structures", in which we will compare BVH costs on various GPU architectures and drivers and attempt to understand the details enough on AMD hardware to make sense of the numbers!

Reposts appreciated :)

zeux.io/2025/03/31/m...

I see this more as a big corp opened a service which allows you to order Simpson merch without owning the IP. Yeah, a skilled artist could make such a t-shirt himself, but it's not the same as a company earning money by selling them.

Well, obviously would prefer a tech paper actually digging into tech, but still it's a nice post with some hints. Hopefully one day the embargo will be lifted.

Interesting to see a bit of details behind the amazing DLSS tech: research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/DL...

In UE we just write out line data to a buffer and then draw those lines using the rasterizer.

VT surface catching has always been a very tempting idea, which could help with lots of things, but how do you deal with generating unique and reasonable UVs on UGC content? Some things like foliage don't seem to have a good solution.

Not sure what's the definition of PT translucency, but UE5 RT translucency does trace paths. This is how it can do multiple reflection/refraction events, where each hit needs to be lit by multiple light sources and receive GI.

Graphics Programming Conference 2024 - YouTube The Graphics Programming Conference is a three day event in November. We have keynotes from industry experts, presentations, and “masterclass” workshops with...

Graphics Programming Conference 2024 talks are up. Looking forward to learning the new Tomasz magic :) www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

It's just a latest type of one of those weird airplane audio jacks, preventing people from stealing headphones: www.amphenolpcd.com/wp-content/u...

Nowadays you could make a good living from videos like that on YouTube :)

Does anyone know whether DoF is done through path tracing or post in offline movie rendering? I've heard that it's mostly done in post due to performance and extra flexibility, but I wonder whether that's still the case, and whether some shots are rendered (challenging DoF) and some in post.

Shipped solution uses a small runtime NN, but at the end of the talk they mentioned that they later found a faster alternative, which they call there "product fields".

Talk was amazing, but not sure if this is an example of an appealing NN application, as they came up with a better non-NN solution at the end :)

I meant barriers for hobby projects. As for the practicality and performance cost, indeed that's an issue as ML is a quite bruteforce solution. I suspect upscalers don't run per pixel ML due to cost and inability to quantize. Rather they output downscaled/quantized heuristics, which then drive TAAU.