A lovely tribute to a recently-departed singular talent. jericsmith.com/2025/12/17/g...

Nice! My better half's new YA book about Anna Atkins is on a number of Best of 2025 lists, including: www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture...

I got to do an explainer of neural shading-- with my NVIDIA hat on this time, and still full of Slang goodness! It's posted over at the NVIDIA developer blog: developer.nvidia.com/blog/how-to-...

Really think this Shtetl Optimized piece by Harvey Lederman is worth reading: scottaaronson.blog?p=9030 Not sure it's an optimistic future, but it is a future that is still joyful

Today we released a new demo showcasing RTX Mega Geometry, ReSTIR PT, and DLSS all running together in our NvRTX branch of UE 5.6. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qyo...

<twitches in Greyhair> pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/29/v...

Subtly downgrade a band They Are Unlikely To Be Giants

My Dad played "An Evening Wasted With" for me when I was a very wee kiddo, and I remember being pleasantly shocked that grownups were allowed to be hilariously and cleverly snarky and sarcastic. A truly formative moment. He had a great run, but still: Damnit. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/a...

Today in "why didn't anybody tell me about this a decade ago": github.com/chrisant996/...

When I found a pub with an inverted normal map. (If you understand what this means, you have to repost.)

Join us next week for the next installment of Getting Started with Slang! This webinar will be on the Reflections API. When: July 8th at 8:00am PDT Learn more and register: shader-slang.org/event/2025/0... #Slang #Reflections #API

If you’re quick, there’s a rare chance to see the only known photographs of the early computing pioneer, Ada Lovelace, as they will go on display in London for a few days. www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/see...

Finally finished adding @shader-slang.bsky.social shaders to all my (almost 100) @vulkan.org open source samples and wrote a bit about it here: www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/06... tl;dr: I very much enjoyed this :)

The founder of Penn's graphics program, Prof. Norm Badler, passed away last week. Norm was one of the early pioneers of CG, and over the past 50 years his students- thousands across PhD, Masters, and undergrad- have gone on to build much of today's CG field and industry. (1/5)

Fun project from nmrobots.com. All it needs now is a camera, a beefier processor, and a suitable host.

Looking to get started with Slang and neural graphics, but not sure where to start? We're hosting a virtual meetup where I'll do a walkthrough from the ground up! Join me May 20! shader-slang.org/event/2025/0...

The second in my series on Gaussian splatting in Slang has been posted! Here, I walk through how to go from the simplistic & slow implementation in my last GS example to something much speedier. (Although I may still have some more tricks up my sleeves there...) shader-slang.org/blog/2025/04...

Really enjoying this old documentary on computer graphics youtu.be/W8-54-9J9ns

Our #GDC25 talk "Path Tracing Nanite in NVIDIA Zorah" is now online, free to watch for all: www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-dem...

IRL NEE Nightmare

Progress has been made.

To anyone at GDC interested in neural rendering/texture compression: Alexey Panteleev is speaking tomorrow at 9:30am on how the new Cooperative Vector functionality in HLSL was used to implement the RTXNTC library. Start your week off strong! schedule.gdconf.com/session/adva...

"Thunderbirds are go!"

For those interested: Alexey Panteleev will be giving a presentation about his work on Neural Texture Compression at Vulcanized 2025 on Thursday, February 13th at 9:30. www.vulkan.org/events/vulka...

I'm very proud to announce that today NVIDIA has released our first public SDK for Neural Texture Compression (NTC)! github.com/NVIDIA-RTX/R... NTC exploits neural techniques to achieve 12-24x compression of PBR material textures with quality comparable or better than BC formats.

Thanks to a lot of colleagues' great work, happy to share Vulkan samples for RTX Mega Geometry. They should run on all RTX GPUs using today's new drivers github.com/nvpro-sample... github.com/nvpro-sample... github.com/nvpro-sample... github.com/nvpro-sample...

Re-upping for Reasons. Paper: "Although the techniques proposed in this article focus on the one-dimensional problem, their principles can be easily extended to multiple dimensions." Me, an idiot, three weeks later:

Today's project with The Boy: External power and trigger for motorized nerf gun knockoff. Good fun!

OH: "I tend to be very self-defecating."

If I had an online store that sold text editors, I would totally name it Vim Vendors.

Today's find: Weston Model 627 Cine Exposure Meter (Type 1), 1933. Still working!

mark e.smith reads lovecraft's the colour out of space for christmas youtu.be/4ZZ8m8I2kE4?...

Misread "Kaplansky density theorem" as "Kaplansky dentistry theorem" and I for a second there I was truly intrigued.

He's making a man He's checking fresh graves He'll soon learn remorse If that dude misbehaves Frankenstein has hubristic flaws

On behalf of the '25 paper chairs: 🎉 The #HPG2025 Call for Papers is LIVE! Join us in beautiful Copenhagen, June 23-25, for cutting-edge discussions on graphics hardware and software. Co-located with #EGSR2025, it's the perfect stage for your research. 👉 highperformancegraphics.org/2025/program...

If you’re in the field of computing, I highly recommend spending time watching THE MOTHER OF ALL DEMOS. Key things to notice: • Nothing that enables the demo existed. Not even interrupt paths on the CPU. • To this day, the things demonstrated there don’t exist as products or computing concepts.

The Origins of the Krakatoa point renderer. Developed in a few days back in 2004, Krakatoa and its descents went on to be used on Avatar, Superman Returns, Harry Potter, Transforms and a ton of other high profile Hollywood films. benhouston3d.com/blog/the-ori... #vfx #bts

Finding Product Market Fit in a VFX Studio, and Almost Winning a SciTech Oscar: The story behind the creation of the Deadline render manager. benhouston3d.com/blog/buildin...

Hey, y'all! 👋 I'm Tom (or Tomasz if you enjoy Hungarian Notation or Klingon) I cause graphics devices to become lost, and generate all sorts of technical, design & artistic debt in Tiny Glade, together with @anopara.bsky.social, @lydmartin.bsky.social & @odaodaoda.bsky.social

GPU Zen 3 is out! I want to draw attention to the 96(!) page article I was a small part of detailing all the work from tooth-to-tail we put into making ray tracing a reality in Cyberpunk 2077. It is exhaustive and should be a reference for anyone looking to make RTX a reality in their own engines.

Today's find: Supreme Instruments B-400 Diagnometer tube tester (~1929)

So Disney Animation has this awesome interactive page that describes at a high level how we make our movies, and now that Moana 2 is out in theaters today, the page has been updated with Moana 2 stuff. Check it out! disneyanimation.com/process

Sharing a starter setup for using @shader-slang.bsky.social with #WebGPU in C++ with #CMake, either for native or web targets. 🔹 Uses the #reflection API to auto-generate boilerplate code! ✨ 👉 github.com/eliemichel/S... Very happy to take feedback about what's good and bad in this demo! More⤵️ 1/8

Following over 1.5 years of hard work (w/@njroussel.bsky.social &@rtabbara.bsky.social), we just released a brand-new version of Dr.Jit (v1.0), my lab's differentiable rendering compiler along with an updated Mitsuba (v3.6). The list of changes is insanely long—here is what we're most excited about🧵

When my kids are struggling on a hike or a long bike ride, I inspire them with a reminder that pain is just happiness leaving the body.

Slang is now officially under open governance at Khronos, and what better way to celebrate than running Slang shaders directly in your browser with WebGPU? try.shader-slang.org You can also compile your shaders to a variety of targets including Metal and HLSL. I'm giddy to finally share this!

Chat GPT prompt: “Based on what you know about me make an image about what you think my life looks like”

I'm pretty impressed by OpenAI's o1-preview so far. I threw it a few atypical CUDA implementation questions, and its answers were surprisingly complete, accurate, and nuanced. It's the first time I've pasted a nontrivial amount of code straight into a .cu file and had it work the first time.

Looking to leave the deadbird site, but worried about leaving your history behind? Here's a nice project that imports tweets from a twitter archive to Bluesky, preserving dates and media. (For obvious reasons, it won't import your replies to others.) github.com/marcomaroni-...