This year at GDC, my peers Evan, Kelsey, and Richard will showcase the latest progress in the UE NvRTX branch, including LSS optimized hair strands path tracing, an area I’ve had the privilege to work on over the past couple of months.
schedule.gdconf.com/session/stat...
Likely via dual scattering:
www.cemyuksel.com/research/dua...
Used in most engines to resolve multiple scattering events in hair quickly. The real hard part is computing strand count in the scattering direction. Usually done with deep opacity maps or probe grid.
It has arrived
Most/all the HDRP folks left a couple years ago, myself included
Thanks! GFXReconstruct basically records graphics API calls (D3D12, Vulkan) into a trace file and lets you play it back to reproduce the GPU workload. Handy for hardware vendors to repro driver bugs. This seems like that but even better, since you keep the CPU runtime :)
(In the best way possible)
This is insane.
Wait, is this like gfxreconstruct but it replays the CPU runtime?
Hey All, I made a header only C++ library (MIT) where line of code inits, then you can start writing to pixels on the screen.
I call it thirteen.h, inspired by the simplicity of the 13h days.
Examples include a mandelbrot viewer and a playable mine sweeper game.
github.com/Atrix256/Thi...
Can’t you use the Xcode Cmake generator to produce the solution for publishing and just use Ninja (or whatever else) for normal development?
Legend has it, this actually almost happened many years ago. The plan fell apart, of course
A sneak peak of what I've been working on: A strand based hair system for Jolt Physics (WIP): youtu.be/Rl19G0c003o
Stepping through vkQueueSubmit until I get lost on a debug build of the RADV drivers.
The other holiday project has been to write a from-scratch Multi-layer Perceptron and train it on the MNIST handwritten digit database. Currently just getting things into memory...
I got tired of writing the same Vulkan + ImGui + GLFW application boilerplate, so I finally snapped and rolled it into a simple library for mine and your fast cross-platform prototyping enjoyment:
github.com/parsaiej/Aule
Wow, good to know! Sadly it looks like my talk was in an unrecorded Advances session (2022 Part III) 🥲
Concave area light whitepaper when?
My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :)
www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap...
I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".
Try KosmicKrisp (upcoming MoltenVK replacement 🙂) and tell us how it is!
www.lunarg.com/lunarg-at-xd...
For a while I was going 100% Vulkan and using MoltenVK to reach macOS for a project, but switched to NRI a couple years ago and have had a good time. The maintainer is also really responsive.
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...
That feeling when the superluminal trace is a green wall
RenderDoc v1.40 is now available! This version includes support for VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer, and vulkan 1.4, as well as some other bug fixes an quality of life improvements.
Full release notes: github.com/baldurk/rend...
Binary builds: renderdoc.org/builds
Symbol look up happens at creation time (just using backtrace-cpp lib for that. C++23 did bring <stacktrace> but it wasn’t very stable for me)
I will dust it off and publish it soon, I have been meaning to do something similar for DRED breadcrumbs as well for better GPU hang analysis
Finally snapped: made a Vulkan layer that auto-labels objects with a stack trace at creation time. Now the validation layer can just tell me what I forgot to release on vkDestroyDevice :)
#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances talks slides sharing: "Strand-based hair and fur rendering in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" by Sergei Kulikov from Machine games is now online advances.realtimerendering.com/s2025/index....
Downloading pre-compiled shaders on PC????
devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/intr...
As the date for the 20th anniversary of Advances is coming, I realized some content was missing.
Posted 2007 and 2008 courses online - check them out!
advances.realtimerendering.com
Quick! Back to ImGui!
