Alex Tardif

New blog post: Outlining an alternative path to learn graphics programming.

themaister.net/blog/2025/10...

Paged Out! Deeply technical zine. And it's free.

I recommend looking at new Paged Out issue #7 - a free magazine with lots of articles, one page each. This one includes my article "Modern 4K Intros on the Demoscene".
pagedout.institute

YouTube video by SIGGRAPH Advances in Real-Time Rendering RAY TRACING THE WORLD OF ASSASSIN'S CREED SHADOWS (Advances in Real-Time Rendering SIGGRAPH 2025)

Ray tracing The World of #AssassinsCreedShadows (Siggraph 2025) available on YouTube youtu.be/2K-rwy4aMmU?...

New blog post! In "Billions of triangles in minutes" we'll walk through hierarchical cluster level of detail generation of, well, billions of triangles in minutes. Reposts welcome!

zeux.io/2025/09/30/b...

Anisotropic Scaling in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and DOOM: The Dark Ages While working on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and later DOOM: The Dark Ages, it became apparent that both titles are particularly sensitive to anisotropic sampling cost on the Xbox Series con…

A little something I've been meaning to write for a while martinfullerblog.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/a...

Thank you to the awesome people at Machine Games and id Software!

Agility SDK 1.618: Advanced Shader Delivery and 1.716 out of preview - DirectX Developer Blog We are pleased to announce the retail release of AgilitySDK 1.618, available on Agility SDK Downloads today! This release promotes our 1.716 features out of preview and also introduces support for the...

Advanced Shader Delivery is here devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/agil...

I have some memory that nointerpolation may (on some hardware at least) cause that export to not be packed with interpolated vertex exports, and depending on how many you have and the way the memory lines up, that could be relevant

The performance impact of vertex shader exports Following up on the previous post on GPU utilization and performance, and to provide a practical example, I expanded a bit on a topic discussed in brief: vertex shader exports and their impact on p…

Continuing on the topic of GPU utilisation and performance, as a practical example, I looked a bit deeper into the impact of vertex shader exports on the cost of a drawcall and wrote another blog post with some observations interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2025/09/21/t...

Lucky timing for me! Been playing Warframe a bunch too, lightning is striking repeatedly here, and I'm excited to contribute to it :D

And with that last thread ended, I'm so excited to share that tomorrow is my first day at Digital Extremes!

After the project cancellation I finally had the chance to pop open Soulframe after getting access a long time ago, and I got hooked so quickly that I jumped at their job page.

PS: I did end up going with a studio using custom tech. This would have been an easy call years ago, to just keep learning from different ways people write engines, but this time I made this choice knowing I may actually be severely limiting my future opportunities.

I followed my heart though :-)

This remote support is very cool. One I'd like to shout out is this job at Yellow Brick which is still open: yellowbrickgames.ca/job/graphics...

I loved my experience interviewing with them, and their next title is a unique opportunity if you're looking.

More good news - the amount of remote opportunities as a game graphics programmer are higher than I have ever seen. I counted them in the dozens (40+) at time of application, most of them Unreal-based. Six years ago that number would have been near-zero.

On the flip-side, in the wake of all these layoffs from large corporations, are springs of many new small studios who would otherwise have no chance of making their games without UE5.

Both edges of the sword are sharp!

I think the impacts are both very positive and very negative.

Consolidation is not great, especially when the future relies on the perpetual good graces of one company, which is not usually a good bet. Learning fundamentals may also be diminishing as a result (not enough info)

I haven't written a followup because the reality is (I would imagine) pretty clear, the Unreal takeover is real and the implications are a lot to think about.

UE may ultimately become the tool we're required to know, like artists with their DCCs.

That experience has been shared by a number of people I know who were also on the job hunt at the same time.

Some years ago I wrote a post titled "On the Perceived Inevitability of Unreal" and its impact on the industry from my (limited) perspective --

3 of the studios using UE turned my application down immediately at the front door citing "lack of professional experience with UE5" No screening.

Because I had not worked on a UE5 title specifically, which was formally released less than 4 years ago, three companies felt I was a non-starter

Sharing some details about my job hunt in case it's helpful to someone!

After our project got canned I applied to 12 jobs as a first, and mercifully last, batch.

6 were Unreal-based, 6 were custom tech

this is beautiful

Nodding all through "What's Changed For Me Personally"

"Like I mentioned earlier, with bindless you can effectively represent any resource descriptor as 32-bit integer or handle that you store freely in structs"

The simplicity this one thing unlocks on GPU and host side is staggering :D Great post

If you work with D3D12, this is the post you want to read!

Silksong :D

Love this one Kostas! There are surprisingly few (public) resources on this subject and you cover lots of great examples here.

Especially love the async compute example to show how two workloads that don't compete much for the same resources can be overlapped nicely.

Thanks for writing :-)

GPU utilisation and performance improvements Drill deep into a GPU’s architecture and at its heart you will find a large number of SIMD units whose purpose is to read data, perform some vector or scalar ALU (VALU or SALU) operation on i…

New blog post discussing a few approaches to bottleneck reduction and GPU utilisation and performance increase interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2025/08/29/g...

Slides from my SIGGRAPH 2025 and CEDEC 2025 talks “Fast as Hell: idTech 8 Global Illumination”, are now publicly available through the Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course. Lecture recordings will be available soon on the course's YouTube channel.

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.

SIGGRAPH 2025 links: blog.selfshadow.com/2025/08/15/s.... I'll be adding more soon. Let me know if I'm missing anything.

Fundamental Vulkan Samples rework Fundamental Vulkan Samples rework (Sync, command buffers and more) Some history It’s been almost ten years since I started working on my open source C++ Vulkan samples. Never would I have imagined wha...

When I started work on my @vulkan.org #Vulkan C++ samples almost 10 years ago I made some non-optimal decisions esp. around sync and command buffer recording. Finally fixed those and did a write-up with a small retrospective at www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/08...

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...