Joined November 2023
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Mar 11
Current state of Sundown renderer: (cheapish) DDGI Stochastic SSR GT-VBAO SVSMs EEVEE-style Bloom Deferred Lighting Other Stuff. Running in a pseudo-bindless pipeline, as much as JS WebGPU allows.
My laptop was overheating from all the dev and open apps at this point so it started power throttling and cycling between laptop 3070 and iGPU.
Still a few artifacts and quality touchups to get to, but currently trying to push performance as much as possible to fit within a decent 30fps budget for mobile and iGPUs.
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Jun 12
People really underestimate how vast outer space is.
We are sitting in a tiny rock that has already produced trillions of dollars worth of value with it's limited resources in just a few hundred years.
Imagine how much more value you can exploit in the vastness of space.
There is no hard cap. Companies that sell shovels for space exploration can break into quadrillion dollar markets in the next century or two.
Jun 12
People are treating SpaceX like a once in a lifetime opportunity.
But if you invest $11,000 today, SpaceX needs to reach $3.5 trillion just for you to make another $11,000.
For context, Microsoft's entire market cap right now is $2.858 trillion.
SpaceX needs to become larger than Microsoft, the 4th most valuable company on earth, just to double your money.
That is how expensive this IPO already is.
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May 26
Isn't this just meshlet-based rendering with regular LODs? Nanite stitches intra-model meshlet LODs based on screen coverage, so the LODs are sort of mesh-independent.
This seems to be switching out wholesale LODs for meshes, with meshlet based rendering, which seems the same but the difference between this and Nanite is subtle yet important. x.com/hybridherbst/status/20โฆ
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May 26
If you have a giant, high-poly mesh (for example some combined building or structural asset), this LODs up the entire thing as soon as you're within a few dozen meters due to the size, as opposed to something like Nanite which only LODs in the clusters of that mesh that need detail.
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May 21
Put together an immediate mode 3D UI framework in Sundown that makes it easy to set up UI programmatically
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May 21
Still need to fix UI element shadowing, but API is pretty straightforward. You can run these kinds of functions in a hot loop (immediate mode style) and frame-to-frame changes are properly handled by the backend
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May 21
I hope Rockstar licenses this banger for GTA6. Kodak vibe in a virtual recreation of Miami-Dade/Broward. Peak video game.
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May 10
If current trends continue, software engineering as a whole will morph into software design, which might be bittersweet but necessary.
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Mar 24
Had meshlets already set up via an offline cooking step with meshoptimizer for a while, but then procrastinated on that to work on some other optimizations and a CVAR-like config system and some other QoL stuff ๐
Finally took some time to start hooking in the imported meshlets into a new viz. buffer pipeline. Still gotta work on frustum/occlusion culling for meshlets, setting up a CLAS for ray traversal and leveraging meshlets during the SVSM stages,
but this effectively collapses a ton of draw calls (per material mesh) into a single viz. buffer raster pass and a single GBuffer resolve (from the viz. buffer), since Sundown already has a pseudo-bindless data setup for materials and textures, so it's not quite there but it's coming along ๐ค
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Mar 24
This is one of the best rising accounts on here. We need more completely delusional positivity in a world that is shattering from negativity on all sides.
Being a realist doesn't mean you need to be pessimistic about everything. You can still be a realist and a complete optimist at the same time.
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Mar 21
Not necessarily a cut at this but it's weird how there's always this discourse around technology about what makes you "more human" like its a fucken contest and if you somehow lose out at the bottom you're subhuman and deserve to rot.
No wonder religion exists. We're all human. It's not a "more" or "less" thing. It doesn't matter if you're developing technology or creating art or running a political campaign. You're as human as anyone else, regardless.
Mar 20
๐จ Anthropic CEO says STEM is losing its edge, and what makes you โmore humanโ will decide your future
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Mar 17
This is vital and partly why artistic mediums are so important: they either portend or inspire the future.
They are a guiding light for our descendants, and if you are a storyteller or artist you have a responsibility to leave blueprints for a better world, even if the message is subtle.
The future of humanity should be bright, not bleak, and stories more often than not dictate what direction we move in.
Stories shape our future. Story tellers manifest our destiny. Someone, somewhere, is writing an epic screenplay that is more Star Trek, than Terminator. A vision of a compelling and optimistic tomorrow that will shape humanityโs next few decades.
The cell phone, the internet, humanoid robots, self-driving cars, voice assistants, and Starships were all imagined in science fiction before they were built by engineers. Stories are blueprints.
Question: What if we asked storytellers around the world to envision an epic and compelling future for humanity, and then funded them to produce that film? What if we could flood the world with positive visions of the future, rather than dystopian predictions?
Announcing the Future Vision XPRIZE ๐งต
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Mar 17
This is now obvious in hindsight, because history shows that any new mass ideology or way of thinking begins to create massive divides in human populations over time, but we have reached a point where there are massive extremes of anti-technology and pro-technology people.
Technology used to be about the promise of new utility and an optimistic future for humankind. It worked exclusively under those constraints.
Unfortunately widespread adoption, nihilism and extreme pessimism have turned technology into a political battlefield, and we are in danger of becoming a stagnant civilization that no longer seeks to improve its outcomes.
For every optimist developing a promising technology, there are dozens of pessimists ready to tear it down.
In the context of modern times, the real salient point is this: the arts are important for human expression, communication and general well being, but technology is the key driver behind civilizational progress.
When you support a massive campaign to tear down either of these thing, you are indirectly putting the human race at risk. If either of these things (arts or technology) goes bust indefinitely, we are all royally fucked.
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Mar 16
From a rendering tech POV, this is absolutely insane. I wish it wasn't a black box but it does kind of push the uncanny valley a bit further. I just hope there's some kind of steerability tools that come with this that help art direction not look like some generic AI generated video.
Mar 16
Announcing NVIDIA DLSS 5, an AI-powered breakthrough in visual fidelity for games, coming this fall.
DLSS 5 infuses pixels with photorealistic lighting and materials, bridging the gap between rendering and reality.
Learn More โ nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/newโฆ
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Mar 12
I do have to admit, all the controversy and generative art push-back aside, LLMs actually might turn out to be one of the most important innovations of the century.
I'm at the point where pretty much everyone I encounter in daily life, family, friends, everyone including people well outside of the tech sector, are constantly delegating questions and queries to some ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude/etc.
And I don't even have to mention how useful they've become for cooperative software engineering.
We thought it was a fad but it turns out it was bigger than that.
And if you love engineering software and creating then you know the tide is turning but not at all in a bad way.
I think this collective feeling of "I don't enjoy coding anymore because it's so easy with AI" is good to talk about and realize, and I have it too
I miss going to bed with a coding challenge I have to get through and then wake up and in the shower I get the answer and I scream EUREKA!!!!!
But then you quickly just have to accept that the world has permanently changed now and it's just not going back because letting AI code for you is simply so much faster and effective and will only get better with every passing year
So the better mental approach for me to these things is to just aggressively embrace it and change myself instead, if the fun in solving the challenges is gone, where else can I find the fun?
I'm lucky a bit because for me the fun has always been building new things in general, not so much the coding part, although the coding challenges were fun for me too. But having ideas and just building new things was always the most fun. So I have to double down on that now, making more things and making better things and making them much faster than before.
Especially now that literally everyone in the world has access to the same coding skill as everyone else (which is AI), the focus will have to aggressively be on what remains as a differentiator for me as a creator, which is my ideas and the way I execute them, not coding them
So that's what I will try focus on from now on I think
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Mar 11
Current state of Sundown renderer: (cheapish) DDGI Stochastic SSR GT-VBAO SVSMs EEVEE-style Bloom Deferred Lighting Other Stuff. Running in a pseudo-bindless pipeline, as much as JS WebGPU allows.
My laptop was overheating from all the dev and open apps at this point so it started power throttling and cycling between laptop 3070 and iGPU.
Still a few artifacts and quality touchups to get to, but currently trying to push performance as much as possible to fit within a decent 30fps budget for mobile and iGPUs.
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Mar 11
One of my favorite test scenes, better idea of some of the remaining rendering artifacts present.
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Mar 11
And a quick photo dump (some physically non-correct stuff happening with the AO contribution but it's fixable).
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Mar 10
Funny how the current state of ray tracing just moved us back to fixed function pipelines.
After decades of making programmable shaders the mainstay to move us away from fixed function hardware, we are now back to relying on fixed function hardware to do any kind of ray traversal, ray generation, (most) upscaling, etc.
Which would be nice if hardware wasn't so costly and difficult to produce, or if there were more ubiquitous standards.
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Mar 10
I largely agree with this. People forget that gameplay and story aside, your first impression of any virtual experience will almost always be visual.
If your eye immediately registers something ugly or derivative, you will skip it. That first impression is one of the most important things for a game.
Every MBA and business guru knows that the hook in any piece of marketing is sometimes more important than the rest of the content of marketing material.
This is no different when showing off an audio-visual experience.
Mar 9
I disagree.
Ray Tracing, when done well, adds a layer of realism that heightens immersion for me personally.
Not the obvious reflections necessarily, but GI, lighting, shadows. It can transform a games visual presentation.
Then of course, if you have high end HW, Path Tracing takes that to another level.
This is not even factoring in how RT can help in game development when used as a baseline (Indiana Jones, Doom Dark Ages for example).
Resi Requiem was also clearly built around RT as a baseline imo, with it stripped out only on HW that can't run it.
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Mar 10
Who's gonna tell him?
Death Stranding 2 is a prime example of why you don't need Ray Tracing for a visually stunning game.
It looks objectively better and sharper than most Ray Traced games and doesn't suffer from any noise or ghosting issues at all.
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