Krzysztof Narkowicz
@knarkowicz.bsky.social
1.5K followers 150 following 38 posts
Engineering Fellow at Epic Game. I love games, graphics and lighting. https://knarkowicz.wordpress.com
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knarkowicz.bsky.social
MegaLights slides were just posted online. There's a bunch of details in slide notes if you're curious how our new Stochastic Direct Lighting solution works, why we made it and want to learn a bit about the problem space.
ceruleite.bsky.social
#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course slides for "MegaLights: Stochastic Direct Lighting in Unreal Engine 5” talk by @knarkowicz.bsky.social and @tiagocostav.bsky.social from Epic Games are now online
advances.realtimerendering.com/s2025/index....
knarkowicz.bsky.social
It was recorded, so at some point it should be available on the ACM website.
knarkowicz.bsky.social
MegaLights slides were just posted online. There's a bunch of details in slide notes if you're curious how our new Stochastic Direct Lighting solution works, why we made it and want to learn a bit about the problem space.
ceruleite.bsky.social
#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course slides for "MegaLights: Stochastic Direct Lighting in Unreal Engine 5” talk by @knarkowicz.bsky.social and @tiagocostav.bsky.social from Epic Games are now online
advances.realtimerendering.com/s2025/index....
Reposted by Krzysztof Narkowicz
ceruleite.bsky.social
#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course slides for "MegaLights: Stochastic Direct Lighting in Unreal Engine 5” talk by @knarkowicz.bsky.social and @tiagocostav.bsky.social from Epic Games are now online
advances.realtimerendering.com/s2025/index....
knarkowicz.bsky.social
Thank you @ceruleite.bsky.social for 20 years of organizing the Adavances course. I did learn a lot from it over the years. And also for a really well chosen speaker swag :)
Reposted by Krzysztof Narkowicz
ceruleite.bsky.social
It's time to share the program for the 2025 Advances in Real-time Rendering in Games.

Check out all the details here: advances.realtimerendering.com/s2025/index....

and, of course, come attend the course live on Tuesday August 12 at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver!
knarkowicz.bsky.social
We use a similar technique in UE, but using cheap AO derived from the distance fields, which then artists use to modify materials in material shaders. Though it's much less powerful - more like a procedural scene-aware texturing than a mesh blend system.
knarkowicz.bsky.social
Amazing talk about Neural Materials. Lots of insight - from why layered materials are important to an overview of current neural solutions and their tradeoffs: youtu.be/xUnXPNFWJUY?...
The Future of Analytical Materials in a Neural World
YouTube video by High-Performance Graphics
youtu.be
knarkowicz.bsky.social
My feeling is that 20y ago there was a huge barrier to start, but if you could land a publishing deal (even on Steam) your game would at least recoup a large part of the budget. Nowadays the risk is much higher.
knarkowicz.bsky.social
It's very simple. One is checkerboarding and the other one is half/quater res.
knarkowicz.bsky.social
Well, it's more like "Go, go, go, fuck (KURWAAA), police" :)
knarkowicz.bsky.social
Great to see you getting this award and certainly well deserved!
knarkowicz.bsky.social
It's designed for run time compression (e.g. real-time captured env maps), so quality isn't the best. If you can compress those offline then likely Compressonator would be a better choice.
knarkowicz.bsky.social
I imagine dynamic register allocation is also quite useful on DXR 1.0, as on hit you need to evaluate materials and they can have highly variable complexity. At least in the future, as for now it seems like everyone is either simplifying or caching materials for perf reasons.
knarkowicz.bsky.social
It reminds me of FMV games, which were a cool idea, but it also was a dead end due to various limitations of the tech.
knarkowicz.bsky.social
Another great article from Chips and Cheese. This time about dynamic RDNA4 register allocation. Having full dynamic allocation would be huge for all those complex shaders we write nowadays, but as the article shows it's not easy to get there.
chipsandcheese.bsky.social
Hello you fine Internet folks,

Today we are continuing our deep-diving into the RDNA4 architecture with looking at the newly added Dynamic Register Allocation and how it compares to Nvidia's `setmaxnreg`.

Hope y'all enjoy!

open.substack.com/pub/chipsand...

old.chipsandcheese.com/2025/04/05/d...
Dynamic Register Allocation on AMD's RDNA 4 GPU Architecture
Modern GPUs often make a difficult tradeoff between occupancy (active thread count) and register count available to each thread.
open.substack.com
Reposted by Krzysztof Narkowicz
zeux.io
New blog post! "Measuring acceleration structures", in which we will compare BVH costs on various GPU architectures and drivers and attempt to understand the details enough on AMD hardware to make sense of the numbers!

Reposts appreciated :)

zeux.io/2025/03/31/m...
Measuring acceleration structures
Hardware accelerated raytracing, as supported by DirectX 12 and Vulkan, relies on an abstract data structure that stores scene geometry, known as “acceleration structure” and often referred to as “BVH...
zeux.io
knarkowicz.bsky.social
I see this more as a big corp opened a service which allows you to order Simpson merch without owning the IP. Yeah, a skilled artist could make such a t-shirt himself, but it's not the same as a company earning money by selling them.
knarkowicz.bsky.social
Well, obviously would prefer a tech paper actually digging into tech, but still it's a nice post with some hints. Hopefully one day the embargo will be lifted.
knarkowicz.bsky.social
In UE we just write out line data to a buffer and then draw those lines using the rasterizer.
knarkowicz.bsky.social
VT surface catching has always been a very tempting idea, which could help with lots of things, but how do you deal with generating unique and reasonable UVs on UGC content? Some things like foliage don't seem to have a good solution.
knarkowicz.bsky.social
Not sure what's the definition of PT translucency, but UE5 RT translucency does trace paths. This is how it can do multiple reflection/refraction events, where each hit needs to be lit by multiple light sources and receive GI.
knarkowicz.bsky.social
It's just a latest type of one of those weird airplane audio jacks, preventing people from stealing headphones: www.amphenolpcd.com/wp-content/u...
www.amphenolpcd.com
knarkowicz.bsky.social
Nowadays you could make a good living from videos like that on YouTube :)