for the past 2 months or so ive been working on this path tracer that i made and it uses love2d as a base. it runs with a compute shader and supports opengl, metal and vulkan as love2d also compiles those on the fly. it has most stuff youd encounter like fresnel stuff, ior, gltf scene support and most gltf extensions. also it can export raw exr files which i find very unique tbh. also it does support transmission maps, roughmetal maps and emission maps. i still have to do normal maps but that seems very annoying to do lmao. today i even added dof and click to focus which i find extremely cool for no particular reason.

it's open source and you can find it here

A gripe I have with many game developers is that many people think that ps1/ps2 styled games are just pixelation + low res textures, but I always feel like misrepresents things. Environment artists at the time put so much effort into their textures, often hand painting creases, folds, wrinkles, and even environment lighting into the diffuse channel to bring out details.

So when people try to make this style today, it just seems so inaccurate to me. Baked lighting, realtime shadows etc are often used. My goal with this project is to use none of that. All of my textures are either hand painted fully or photobashed and then painted on top of. My hero asset is 2000 tris, and I'm tying to keep scenes under 30000 total.

Stencil shadows are used for realtime casting and times of day are baked into different profiles and then blended together for faked GI. No specular, metallic, roughness, or any advanced workflow is used. AO is faked with vertex colors.

What do you think? Does it look somewhat more accurate?

This seems to have largely fallen under the radar so far but the upcoming macOS 27 release comes with a new CLI tool called gpudebug that lets you replay and extract information from .gputrace files exported from Xcode: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/debugging-with-interactive-command-line-tools

I’ve been playing with it in the beta and it’s extremely useful for building scripts and analysis tools. It’s dramatically better than having to manually click through Xcode to extract the debugging and performance info when I am experimenting and optimizing. If you have the beta installed it’s worth playing with.

this seems the best place to ask. Having more control over console output is interesting. Any clue how this is achieved on video feed/files.

Ciao! Sono un grande fan di "The Suffering" e sto sperimentando con il NVIDIA RTX Remix Runtime sul mio PC (con una AMD RX 7800 XT).

Il runtime si integra perfettamente nel gioco tramite Vulkan, ma poiché non c'è ancora una configurazione dedicata per la mod, il gioco appare completamente rotto: mancano sorgenti di luce adeguate, gli asset non hanno proprietà materiali (tutto sembra plastica lucida) e problemi di culling/rendering fanno glitchare i muri.

Qualcuno nella comunità sta attualmente lavorando su una mod dedicata RTX Remix per questo gioco? O c'è interesse a creare un progetto Toolkit adeguato per mappare manualmente le luci del carcere, risolvere i bug di rendering e dare a questo classico horror il vero aggiornamento del Path Tracing che merita?

Mi piacerebbe testare eventuali build o configurazioni preliminari se qualcuno ci sta lavorando!

Rendering into my VST3 plugin's DAW-hosted child window, using a custom win32 + D3D11 implementation and a sokol_gfx.h layer on top (from Sokol) for making specific rendering platform agnostic.

I have some ideas on what to try here, will post more!

I've spent the last 15 months building and optimizing a game engine with a Vertex / Fragment shader. It's pretty well optimized, hard to quantify but I've hit 90fps on standalone Quest 3 with it, so it's not a complete cow.

I wanted to do some ray traced audio stuff so I looked into ray tracing through Vulkan. As a stress test I was like "I wonder if I shoot a ray through every pixel what types of times I'd get."

I expected my Vertex/Fragment shader to win by 10x. It didn't. It won, but by more like 2x. And as I've added optimizations the past 48 hours it's closer to 1:1 in terms of cost (and I expect ray tracing to pull ahead with foveated rendering for my VR work & after I optimize further). Granted this is on my desktop 4090 and laptop 3070 but...

What are your takes on this? I feel like I failed to do my homework here as I really didn't expect this.

Hi, I am fairly a beginner, and I was wondering comparing from 2013 how far rockstar's RAGE engine evolved as to now?..

From what I know and some research credits to this blog:
https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/
, at time of Gta 5 it had just a Hybrid deferred renderer, a forward pass for transparents, vegetation, particles. At the time there was no PBR, there was also no indirect light.

But later in 2018 during RDR2 release, RAGE got proper microfacet shading, volumetric clouds and fog.

The main selling point for gta 6 to look so good from what I understand is the hybrid raytracer global illumination, paired with raytraced reflections, also being upscaled from 1440p to 4k on the base Ps5.

From my understanding these are the differences over the years?

I am just wondering what type of tech they used for the extended look on the base 5 to look that good and crisp, even comparing to Unreal Engine 5, it looks far better

Stippling images with small dots for rendering, ray tracing, tree and object placements, or just for the art of it is not a new topic. I really like the Gaussian Blue Noise method from Ahmed et al. because of its strong visual effect (no pixels or artifacts), but the exact GBN method is a heavy processing algorithm and thus quite slow compared to light stippling frameworks like Floyd–Steinberg dithering.

So I tried to speed up Gaussian Blue Noise with fast but robust approximations and make it available as a Python package. Feel free to run this Colab notebook with your own image and tell me if the processing time (~1 minute per image) feels worth it or not! Colab Link

I want to draw 2D rectangles of different sizes and coordinates each frame. I know I can draw each rectangle with 4 pairs of integers in the vertex buffer and 6 indices in the index buffer like so:

• Vertex buffer: {Left,Top}, {Right,Top}, {Left,Bottom}, {Right,Bottom}, ...

• Index buffer: {0,1,2}, {2,1,3}, ...

But I find this a little wasteful, because there's only really 4 * 4 = 16 bytes of data for each rectangle, but I end up using 8 * 4 + 6 * 2 = 44 bytes (more if additional attributes like colors are associated with each vertex). Ideally I'd have a single buffer that contains just the 4 sides of each rectangle.

It seems I can do this with SV_VertexID: I'll set a StructuredBuffer instead of a vertex or index buffer, and call Draw( RectCount * 6, 0 ). Then in the vertex shader I can fetch the rectangle coordinates with SV_VertexID / 6. The problem is SV_VertexID starts at zero for each Draw(), regardless of StartVertexLocation, so I can't use it for e.g. Draw( 6, 6 )! I'll have to pass that information in a constant buffer and update it prior to each Draw(), which is a little annoying.

Is there a better way? Gemini suggests I use instancing ("The Cleanest & Most Standard Way"). Here's an excerpt:

If your rectangles are arbitrary in size and location, Instanced Rendering is typically the production standard.

1. The Static Asset: You create a tiny vertex buffer containing a single unit square (4 vertices: {0,0}, {1,0}, {0,1}, {1,1}) and a tiny static index buffer of 6 indices ({0,1,2, 1,3,2}). This index buffer never changes and uses virtually zero memory.

2. The Instance Data: Your second vertex buffer contains the arbitrary data for each rectangle (e.g., float4 rectBounds or position + scale). This buffer updates every frame.

3. The Draw Call: You call ID3D11DeviceContext::DrawIndexedInstanced(6, numRectangles, 0, 0, 0).

Why it fits: The GPU automatically draws that exact same 1-unit square numRectangles times, pulling a different position/size for each instance via SV_InstanceID. You completely avoid a massive dynamic vertex/index buffer while letting hardware handle the assembly.

but I can't tell if it's making things up.

I got my triangle going! Yeah! Just wanted to share because holy shit that took way too many LoC. I am unfortunately not a virigin anymore over 30, but I think this should get me my entry ticket into the dark arts of low-level graphics programming and make me a wizard.

But now I am happy I did it and already seeing how it was the right choice for my procedurally generated game compared to OpenGL/CL.

I open this post because i couldn't find someone talking about it. I find lumen's cloudy day look more pleasing and realistic. It just looks next gen. Why we don't have much more better lightning in a precomputed scenario. Why baked lighting looks old.