Helmut Garstenauer

Screenshot showing skin with micro-occlusion at the top, and micro-shadowing below.

I finally wrapped up the second post on the series about micro-shadowing. On this one I go over a basic approach based on a microsurface, and I show results for different materials and lighting conditions.

irradiance.ca/posts/micros...

Vulkan memory barriers and image layouts explained www.rastergrid.com/blog/gpu-tec...

Shipping Neural Texture Compression in Assassin’s Creed Mirage A neural material texture compression technique that uses machine learning to exploit the cross-channel structure and reconstruct full PBR materials in real time, enabling high compression rate in Ass...

Full article: www.ubisoft.com/en-us/news/i...

Real-time Rendering with a Neural Irradiance Volume
Delivering fast inference (~1ms/frame), a tiny memory footprint (1-5MB), 10x quality gains over probe-based methods @ equivalent mem budgets, bringing neural rendering within reach of consumer hardware without RT or denoising.
arnocoomans.be/eg2026

Adventures in Neural Rendering part 2: Cooperative vectors In the previous blog post we discussed a few potential neural network (MLP) applications in rendering and one of the conclusions was that although easy to implement, inference cost can be quite hig…

Continuing the adventures in neural networks, investigating how they can be hardware accelerated using Cooperative Vectors in HLSL, achieving impressive speedups. interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2026/02/21/a...

Using ReSTIR to importance sample the brightest pixels on an image

www.shadertoy.com/view/XfycWw

IBL Optimization Study III: Shared memory and Latency Hiding Last time , we looked at precomputing irradiance using spherical harmonics and how the math can be simplified compared to the expressions co...

IBL Optimization Study III: Shared memory and Latency Hiding technik90.blogspot.com/2026/02/ibl-...

[BLOG] A frame analysis of Dark Souls III
blog.simonrodriguez.fr/articles/202...

A detailed look at how the FromSoftware game renders a frame, with step-by-step comparisons and explanations.

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Forget Superresolution, Sample Adaptively (when Path Tracing) Real-time path tracing increasingly operates under extremely low sampling budgets, often below one sample per pixel, as rendering complexity, resolution, and frame-rate requirements continue to rise. ...

Interesting paper showing great results for replacing standard low-res rendering + temporal upsampling (DLSS) with high-res GBuffer + adaptive sampling. Makes sense given rising costs of lighting computations vs GBuffer. arxiv.org/abs/2602.08642

"Isometric games don't exist" is a guide with 40 detailed charts about perspective in videogames.

It teaches you everything about isometry and what all the other game perspectives & projections are and how they work.

You can download it for free on my itch page
cyangmou.itch.io/isometric-ga...

While working on spark.js, I realized that common normal map compression formats weren’t supported in popular frameworks like three.js. I added the necessary support to three.js and wrote an article to shed some light on the topic:

ludicon.com/castano/blog...

#webgpu #webgl #threejs #sparkjs

Pushing Simulation to the Limit to Find Order in Chaos YouTube video by Drew's Campfire

A colleague sent me this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jVo...

No further comments needed, it's **very** good.

I've seen some of his videos in the past, but I missed this one. Glad I saw it.

Marcin Zalewski informed me that his blog post on real-time hair rendering using ray tracing is now available:
mmzala.github.io/blog/hair-ge...
This is nice work, in which he compares NVidia's hardware accelerated hair to several alternatives, including Reshetov's Phantom Ray Hair Intersector.

Nanite Tessellation Nanite Tessellation, aka Nanite Dynamic Tessellation, aka Nanite Dynamic Displacement was the next major feature I worked on after Nanite it...

I'm finally writing up how Nanite Tessellation works. The first few blogs posts are up. More will be coming.
graphicrants.blogspot.com/2026/02/nani...

Spinning around: Please don't! - siliceum Embark on a journey about why you should sometimes trust your OS more than yourself.

Ever wrote spin-locks or had to debug them?
I have, and I got tired of seeing (and writing) crappy ones, so I did a real investigation this time.

Spoiler: trust your OS.

siliceum.com/en/blog/post...

Gyms, Zoos, and Museums: Your documentation should be in-game — Robin-Yann Storm, Product & UX Designer for Tools Gyms, Zoos, and Museums: Your documentation should be in-game

My 2025 talk 'Gyms, Zoos, and Museums: Your documentation should be in-game' is now also available in text format, for those who like to read instead of watch: rystorm.com/blog/gyms-zo...

And if you haven't seen it yet, there is an all new video too, with bonus material on the history of Zoos!

Choosing texture formats for WebGPU apps
www.ludicon.com/castano/blog...

Loading large scenes and running out of VRAM? This guide is for you. A follow up to @donmccurdy.com's guide, with a new option: Ship AVIF/WebP over the network, with native block-compressed textures in VRAM

#webgpu #webgl

screen of project page of MeshSplatting

This seems to be extremely cool! will have to find time to set it up

meshsplatting.github.io

I made a directional noise type I call Phacelle Noise which is pretty fast!

Is it new or does something functionally identical already exist? I'm not sure! But I didn't come across one like this yet anyway, so here's my findings:
blog.runevision.com/2026/01/phac...

#Graphics #Shaders #Shadertoy

WebGPU Lines GPU-accelerated line rendering for WebGPU with instanced triangle strips

Still WIP, but *finally* adapted my line rendering module to WebGPU. Managed to salvage pretty much all of the logic from my old WebGL line rendering module. I know there's better algorithms and implementations out there, but I'm relatively content. rreusser.github.io/notebooks/we...

Gradientspace Graph Beta — gradientspace I have released an initial version of Gradientspace Graph (GSGraph), a new C#-based NodeGraph Programming environment that also supports inline text-coding in C# and Python (and LLM-based CodeNode gen...

Hey I made a new thing - it's called Gradientspace Graph, and it's a C#-based NodeGraph Programming system that also supports inline C# and Python "Code Nodes". The NodeGraph Engine is MIT Open-Source and the Editor is Free. More details here: www.gradientspace.com/tutorials/20...

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cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/novelt...
I gave an internal talk at UCSD last year regarding "novelty" in computer science research. In it I "debunked" some of the myth people seem to have about what is good research in computer science these days. People seemed to like it, so I thought I should share.

A timeline visually representing the advice from my post, emphasising how dramatically and reliably having more time, with a testable build, converts to your game being better and your studio being safer.

I've been running an indie games studio for 15 years now, and it felt like a good time to boil down what I've learned into 4 pieces of advice:

www.pentadact.com/2026-01-08-1...

I hope it's of use, not least because goddamn I forgot how long blog posts take to write.

I just released my video about the engine (and game) I've been working on.

The engine is based on dynamic SDFs, and the video describes how it works and what it makes possible.

Link in the reply!

This is my first YouTube video and it took forever - please repost!

My "How to Vulkan in 2026" @vulkan.org #Vulkan guide is now publicly available at www.howtovulkan.com

I still consider it a preview, though I'm mostly happy with it and only plan on changing minor things and incorporating some feedback.

Screenshot of the blog post.

I got the first post about direct lighting material occlusion up on my blog. On this one I go over the commonly used micro-occlusion approach and its limitations, and I start digging into micro-shadowing as an improvement.

irradiance.ca/posts/micros...

No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve pe...

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".

The Ridiculous Engineering Of The World's Most Important Machine YouTube video by Veritasium

Another incredible video from Veritasium, all about the extreme lithography machines produced by ASML. The design & engineering required is simply insane! youtu.be/MiUHjLxm3V0?...