Xander Berten

First time implementing something from a Research Paper. At first it looked really scary but after rereading the paper a few times i got it. Here is my implementation of GTAO (Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion) I had a blast doing this and even got more interested in everything around radiology.

Got myself a ESP32 with a e-ink screen.

I have implemented a fully shader driven rendering pipeline trough slang reflection.

I've been working on a new portfolio site, and somehow i decided to build a ray-marcher inside of it. Shaders are written with slang. Those are being cross-compiled to WGSL (WebGPU) and GLSL (WebGL fallback). here are some debug views that can be viewed from the site

Today i added a new example to my rendering framework, This one implements a third party rendering library (Noesis GUI).

ReSTIR PT, by @daqilin.bsky.social Daqi Lin, Markus Kettunen and @wymancr.bsky.social Chris Wyman: research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/pub... I3D'26.

some more 2D spectral pathtracing

There's a neat short paper from Eurographics this year that evaluates how well microfacet shading models actually predict measured reflectance. The answer is: not nearly as well as one would hope! (1/3) ssteinberg.xyz/2026_surface...

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 438 - April 27h, 2026 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

I think the game jam got out of hand....

INTRODUCTION TO SPHERICAL HARMONICS FOR GRAPHICS PROGRAMMERS finally done. gpfault.net/posts/sph.html

Behind the pretty frames of #PRAGMATA. Breaking down many tricks and hidden gems of the renderer behind CAPCOM's RE Engine. i hope you enjoy & find this few months worth of freetime article useful... mamoniem.com/behind-the-p...

Slang autodifferentiation is pretty cool. Neural BxDF training on the fly :))

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 430 - March 1st, 2026 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

Real-time Rendering with a Neural Irradiance Volume Delivering fast inference (~1ms/frame), a tiny memory footprint (1-5MB), 10x quality gains over probe-based methods @ equivalent mem budgets, bringing neural rendering within reach of consumer hardware without RT or denoising. arnocoomans.be/eg2026

Today i added Temporal Accumulation in my GTAO Implementation. I used Interleaved Gradient Noise as a low discrepancy noise. I could practically halve the render time, while still having better results. Here is a comparison with and without: it's with 2 hemisphere slices and 4 samples each.

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 428 - February 15th, 2026 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

Looking for a basic @vulkan.org #Vulkan descriptor heap example? I've got you covered: github.com/SaschaWillem...

Want to build your own ray tracer or path tracer on AMD GPUs? Our #Raytracing using #HIP paper covers: 🎇 The essential math 🎇 Camera setup, intersections, NEE, BVH 🎇 How to accelerate everything with HIPRT Find it with our papers: gpuopen.com/learn/public... 30MB PDF: gpuopen.com/download/202...

I recently read this paper. Interesting idea to use infrared to decompose the lighting terms. ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp....

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 424 - January 18th, 2026 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 423 - January 11th, 2026 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

Anddd We have NEE and MIS implemented

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 422 - January 4th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

I just released my video about the engine (and game) I've been working on. The engine is based on dynamic SDFs, and the video describes how it works and what it makes possible. Link in the reply! This is my first YouTube video and it took forever - please repost!

GPC 2025 slides are now up! graphicsprogrammingconference.com/archive/2025/

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course talk recording of "MEGALIGHTS: STOCHASTIC DIRECT LIGHTING IN UNREAL ENGINE 5" by @knarkowicz.bsky.social‬ and @tiagocostav.bsky.social‬ from @epicgames.alt.store.ap.brid.gy is now online: youtu.be/dmmN8_c8Tb0?... Enjoy!

-- JOB SEARCH POST/RT APPRECIATED -- Hello everyone! I am available for work (full time position/internship) anywhere in the world with priority going to the EU, starting June 2026. 🧵

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap... I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".

Ke-Sen Huang has a large batch of SIGGRAPH Asia papers today: www.realtimerendering.com/kesen/siga20... Among them: "ReSTIR PG: Path Guiding with Spatiotemporally Resampled Paths" by Zeng et al., which describes a *real-time* framework combining ReSTIR PT and path guiding.

Experimenting with this look for the fractals.

Game Jam progress :)))

Dirty gamedev secret: sometimes instead of building proper debug visualizations I just dump the information to OBJ and use Blender to visualize it 😅 But now at least I know my SDF dual contouring is working

I saw some really interesting talks today! Ive learned a ton about how virtual lights can improve indoor rendering and what the pitfalls are.

This is a great article about ReGIR / World-Space ReSTIR with nice improvements by Tom Clabault: tomclabault.github.io/blog/2025/re...

Implemented whitted-style ray tracing with wavelength-dependent IOR today

My talk about ray-tracing is out! youtu.be/CGR1gu2KW2s?... Here I try to explain it in simple terms, while giving some historical context as well. There is also a quick RTAO implementation with the worst denoise ever here: github.com/JorenJoestar... feedback is more than welcome!

New blog post! Behind the scenes of some of the techniques involved in making our last PC demo 💫 gboisse.github.io/posts/this-i...

Bonus post to end the week: If you are a graphics programmer do yourself a favor and get a MIDI board. It makes the work way more tactile and fun. Full props to Matt and @aaronmjacobs.com for getting me on the MIDI train. :)

RayTraced AO 😍

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 415 - November 2nd, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

I've released a simple RTAO implementation, written for the DevGames2025 conference. a poor-man's RTAO, showing how much the real problem is denoising. I wanted to write the simplest RT as an introduction to it. Vulkan+HLSL+Code generation for Descriptors github.com/JorenJoestar...

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 394 - June 9th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

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 :)

I'll be talking about SDFs and creative workflows tomorrow, hosted by the SIGGRPAH San Francisco Chapter - please sing up here before they close registration tomorrow noon. www.eventbrite.com/e/unlocking-...

Axis-Normalized Ray-Box Intersection "By transforming the ray we eliminate the need for one third of the traditional bounding-slab tests and achieve a speed enhancement of approximately 13.8% or 10.9%" graphics.tu-bs.de/publications...

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 391 - May 11th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

part of my job today was helping someone put sticky notes on themselves. we are so back

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 387 - April 13th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...