This post is part of the series “Finding Next-Gen“.

Just got back from Los Angeles, where I presented in the Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering Course at this year’s SIGGRAPH:

Global illumination (GI) has been an ongoing quest in games. The perpetual tug-of-war between visual quality and performance often forces developers to take the latest and greatest from academia and tailor it to push the boundaries of what has been realized in a game product. Many elements need to align for success, including image quality, performance, scalability, interactivity, ease of use, as well as game-specific and production challenges.

First we will paint a picture of the current state of global illumination in games, addressing how the state of the union compares to the latest and greatest research. We will then explore various GI challenges that game teams face from the art, engineering, pipelines and production perspective. The games industry lacks an ideal solution, so the goal here is to raise awareness by being transparent about the real problems in the field. Finally, we will talk about the future. This will be a call to arms, with the objective of uniting game developers and researchers on the same quest to evolve global illumination in games from being mostly static, or sometimes perceptually real-time, to fully real-time.

You can also download my slides with notes here.

Super grateful to have been part of this initiative. Lots of great content was presented. Thanks to everyone who came to the course!