rendering

A Graphics Programming Conference talk on how the game Tiny Glade renders meadows, trees and player-built castles. It covers real-time global illumination, tilt-shift depth of field, stable shadows with continuous time of day, ray marching and GPU-driven rendering on old hardware.

A Remedy engineer explains how Alan Wake 2 moved to a GPU-driven rendering pipeline built on mesh shaders, culling and rendering meshlets for dense vegetation on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.

A GDC 2015 talk in which Natalya Tatarchuk describes the multithreaded renderer Bungie built for Destiny. It covers the low-latency architecture across platforms, its successes and its challenges.

Brian Karis's SIGGRAPH 2021 talk explains how Unreal Engine 5's Nanite virtualized geometry works. It covers mesh import, the data structures, streaming, decompression, culling, software and hardware rasterization, and shading.

An excerpt from a Bay Area Rust meetup on Servo's WebRender, which renders CSS display lists on the GPU at very high frame rates. It explains the approach and demos rendering at around 500 FPS.

Media Molecule's Alex Evans recounts the journey, including the failures, of finding the Dreams engine, based on his Siggraph 2015 talk. It covers the signed-distance-field and splat-based rendering approach and the artistic goals behind it.

Steven Wittens' JSConf US 2013 talk on drawing with WebGL, using animated visuals to walk through vectors, matrices and the rendering pipeline. Despite the title, it works as a visual primer on the linear algebra behind 3D graphics.

A GDC 2015 talk by Arc System Works technical artist Junya Motomura on how Guilty Gear Xrd rebuilt a classic 2D fighter in full 3D while keeping a hand-drawn look. It covers the art and programming R&D and the stylistic decisions behind it.

Dan Abramov's JSConf Iceland talk on what came after React 16, with live-coded prototypes of async rendering and time slicing. It previews the ideas that became concurrent mode and suspense.

Rik Arends presents Makepad, a Rust UI framework, at RustNL 2023. The talk covers designing modern, GPU-fast UIs with Rust and includes live-coded demos of an IDE and a synthesizer.

Ryan Florence's React.js Conf 2015 talk pushes React into unusual use cases, including a demo comparing rendering in React, Ember and Angular.

Adam Robinson-Yu's GDC 2020 talk on how he shelved a big project to prototype what became A Short Hike. He covers the solo development process and technical choices like a pixel shader over low-poly models.

A HandmadeCon 2016 panel where Chris Hecker, John Miles, Sean Barrett and Chris Green give an oral history of software texture mapping in 90s games.

Daniel Stone, a longtime X and Wayland developer, explains at linux.conf.au 2013 why X11's design became untenable and what motivated Wayland. The talk walks through X's history and accumulated cruft.

Ian Hubert's Blender Conference talk on world building in Blender, covering photogrammetry, camera projection and assembling complex environments from simple shapes at great speed.

SpaceX engineers present at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference on a multi-physics code that simulates the full-scale Raptor methane engine. It covers GPU-based turbulent combustion modeling with adaptive grids and wavelet compression.

X.Org developer Daniel Stone explains the history and technical limits of the X Window System and why Wayland was created, debunking myths from forum comments. He covers topics such as network transparency and blocking calls.

Andrew Adams, a Halide developer, presents the Halide language for image processing and tensor computation. The talk explains the separation of algorithm from schedule with illustrated examples of parallelism, locality and redundancy tradeoffs.

Johann Korndorfer's NVScene 2015 talk on building content with signed distance functions. It focuses on patterns that make SDF modelling more structured, arguing that SDFs capture a shape's essence like vector graphics do compared with polygons or voxels.

Ubisoft procedural technical artist Etienne Carrier explains the Houdini-based tools used to build Far Cry 5's roughly 100 square km open world. It covers generating biomes, texturing terrain, freshwater networks, cliff rocks and vegetation placement.

A full-day recording of the University of Utah computer science department's 50th anniversary event with panels, keynotes and talks by alumni and pioneers. It includes Ivan Sutherland's presentation on single flux quantum electronics.

A linux.conf.au 2013 talk by a Wayland developer who previously worked on X, telling the history of X and why Wayland was created. It covers X's hardware abstraction and architecture and why they became problematic for modern graphics.

Matt Godbolt builds a toy path tracer in C++ in three different styles and compares them on clarity, testability, compile time and run-time performance. The talk was given at CppCon 2019.

Day one of the X.Org Developer's Conference 2020 stream, including talks on the Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan driver, the WSL graphics architecture, X11 and Wayland apps in WSL, and Mesa for D3D12.

Chris McCord's ElixirConf 2018 keynote introduces Phoenix LiveView, which renders HTML on the server and updates the page over websockets. It includes a demo showing that latency is not the bottleneck one might expect.

John Carmack's keynote at Oculus Connect 2014 about the Gear VR and development stories from building it. He discusses mobile GPU optimization, latency, and display ideas like programmable interlacing.

Pete Hunt explains why React's virtual DOM was built, how it compares with databinding-style systems, and what it means for future browser technology. Recorded at FutureJS 2014 in Barcelona.

Tom Dale explains the internals of the Glimmer VM, Ember's rendering engine, which compiles templates to opcodes. The talk includes a performance benchmark demo.

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains in this 2017 GDC session how Overwatch uses an Entity Component System architecture for layered gameplay. He also covers its server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and how they keep the game responsive and fair.

Catherine West's RustConf 2018 closing keynote on building a game in Rust and organizing a large codebase. It builds up an entity component system and generational indices step by step.

Jonathan Blow speaks at UC Berkeley's CSUA about how to program independent games. He argues for keeping code simple, avoiding unnecessary work, and shipping.

Jonathan Blow's first talk on designing a new programming language for games, which became Jai. He explains the problems with C++ and why Go, Rust and D do not fit game development.

Casey Muratori's two-hour talk tracing the history of object-oriented programming back to the 1960s and examining how its ideas, and later entity component systems, came about. It is followed by a Q&A.

In this 2019 GDC session, Petri Purho of Nolla Games explains the technical side of Noita's physics engine, including scaling a falling-sand simulation to large continuous worlds and adding destructible rigid bodies. It also shows how the emergent physics drives the gameplay.

Miguel de Icaza's GodotCon 2023 talk on Swift bindings for Godot. He argues that garbage-collector pauses in C# are a persistent problem and that Swift's reference counting avoids them.

John Carmack's long QuakeCon 2012 keynote, a free-ranging talk covering software engineering, game platforms, game streaming, and his early head-mounted display and VR work.

Valve's John McDonald presents at GDC 2018 on how Valve uses deep learning (VACnet) to detect cheaters in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. He covers training on human-reviewed replays and how model output is confirmed by manual review.

Mick Gordon's GDC 2017 session on composing the Doom (2016) soundtrack. He details his compositional process, production techniques and the experimental instrument and synth design behind the music.

Freya Holmer's Dutch Game Day 2023 talk asking why vectors can't be multiplied, building from complex numbers to a single axiom and arriving at geometric algebra, quaternions and multivectors.

Oskar Stalberg explains how Wave Function Collapse assembles island dioramas from handcrafted tilesets in Bad North. He covers the theory, implementation, tooling, and how he blends art and technology.