Alex Tardif's Avatar

Alex Tardif

@longbool.bsky.social

Senior Graphics Programmer @ Digital Extremes. Previously ZeniMax Online, WB Blog: https://alextardif.com/eden.html

151 Followers  |  197 Following  |  24 Posts  |  Joined: 06.07.2025  |  2.7542

Latest posts by longbool.bsky.social on Bluesky

Soulframe | Preludes - Official Founders Showcase Trailer
YouTube video by Soulframe Soulframe | Preludes - Official Founders Showcase Trailer

Soulframe is cool :-)

26.11.2025 04:23 β€” πŸ‘ 4    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

The post on using spatial hashing with raytraced ambient occlusion attracted quite a bit of interest so I expanded it into a blog post to discuss how it works behind the scenes to both reduce the noise and its cost. interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2025/11/23/s...

23.11.2025 21:05 β€” πŸ‘ 93    πŸ” 27    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 1
Post image

New blog post! Behind the scenes of some of the techniques involved in making our last PC demo πŸ’« gboisse.github.io/posts/this-i...

05.11.2025 21:15 β€” πŸ‘ 111    πŸ” 39    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 1
SIGGRAPH 2025 Advances: STRAND-BASED HAIR AND FUR RENDERING IN INDIANA JONES AND THE GREAT CIRCLE
YouTube video by SIGGRAPH Advances in Real-Time Rendering SIGGRAPH 2025 Advances: STRAND-BASED HAIR AND FUR RENDERING IN INDIANA JONES AND THE GREAT CIRCLE

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course talk recording of "Strand-Based Hair And Fur Rendering In Indiana Jones and The Great Circle" by Sergei Kulikov from MachineGames is now online: youtu.be/jSE1XXBEK-w

11.11.2025 23:45 β€” πŸ‘ 44    πŸ” 20    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 1

This is a goldmine, thank you!

12.11.2025 01:03 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I'm about to get into this too :-) Any favorite resources you recommend?

10.11.2025 01:45 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0
Game Architectures with Alex Evans and Anton Mikhailov
YouTube video by Wookash Podcast Game Architectures with Alex Evans and Anton Mikhailov

i had a chat with lukasz and @antovsky about gamedev and stuff, if youre into that sort of thing! the middle hour is the juiciest but its all fantastic, ofc ;) youtu.be/mFBmoCv5EcQ?...

01.11.2025 19:06 β€” πŸ‘ 47    πŸ” 18    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 2

Beat Silksong tonight :D

Team Cherry made my favorite game <3

09.11.2025 00:55 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Posts

I finally found the time and energy to make a new blog and write a couple of posts. This time I wrote about PBR content and game development principles. Both posts are quite different so hopefully people find something interesting on either one of them.

irradiance.ca/posts/

15.10.2025 18:51 β€” πŸ‘ 36    πŸ” 16    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 2
A case for learning GPU programming with a compute-first mindset – Maister's Graphics Adventures

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

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

05.10.2025 12:58 β€” πŸ‘ 32    πŸ” 10    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
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

05.10.2025 16:30 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 3    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
RAY TRACING THE WORLD OF ASSASSIN'S CREED SHADOWS (Advances in Real-Time Rendering SIGGRAPH 2025)
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?...

30.09.2025 08:08 β€” πŸ‘ 23    πŸ” 3    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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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...

30.09.2025 17:40 β€” πŸ‘ 166    πŸ” 55    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 4
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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!

26.09.2025 09:31 β€” πŸ‘ 64    πŸ” 19    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 1
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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 onΒ Agility SDK DownloadsΒ 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...

26.09.2025 00:25 β€” πŸ‘ 57    πŸ” 12    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 2

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

25.09.2025 23:57 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
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...

21.09.2025 20:05 β€” πŸ‘ 50    πŸ” 13    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0

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

14.09.2025 16:43 β€” πŸ‘ 4    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

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.

14.09.2025 16:43 β€” πŸ‘ 31    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 7    πŸ“Œ 0

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 :-)

14.09.2025 16:43 β€” πŸ‘ 10    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 1
Graphics Programmer – Yellow Brick Games

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.

14.09.2025 16:43 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

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.

14.09.2025 16:43 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

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!

14.09.2025 16:43 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

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)

14.09.2025 16:43 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

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.

14.09.2025 16:43 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

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 --

14.09.2025 16:43 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

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

14.09.2025 16:43 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

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

14.09.2025 16:43 β€” πŸ‘ 19    πŸ” 3    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

this is beautiful

13.09.2025 21:18 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

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

08.09.2025 03:22 β€” πŸ‘ 8    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

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