GPU Zen 3 has been out for 4 months. So, time for a new volume: the GPU Zen 4 CFP is up. Proposals are due May 17th.

• JCGT is back, baybee! Six papers published in the past four months, two more to appear soon. Things were a bit stalled for a while, but we’ve reorganized and have caught up. I’m editor-in-chief until the summer, at which point Alexander Wilkie will take over.
• Consider I3D 2025, May 7-9. It’s in Jersey City this year, just across the river from New York City. Some of the recent JCGT papers will also be presented there. Also, if you’re near the Boston area, consider the free one-day NESG conference at MIT on April 26th.
• SIGGRAPH 2025 hotel registration is open. The page is a bit goofy: you have to pick from the list of hotels, sorted by distance, vs. something sensible like showing you a map and hotel options on it.
• At GDC Microsoft announced more_ray tracing extensions for DirectX 12. Shader execution reordering (SER) is now supported, along with opacity micromaps. SER is a large performance boost for applications using ray tracing. Execution reordering is also a part of Vulkan. Opacity micromaps help in ray tracing things like leaves rendered using cutout textures. As an example of the problem, back in 2020 Activision’s Call of Duty developers noted the heavy cost of alpha-testing textures with AnyHit during ray tracing. This feature improves that situation by making cutout testing much faster.
• I thought our “tools that we use” list was a bit long – see the bottom of this page. That’s nothing – Angelo Pesce gives quite the set of lists in his blog. Some great ones in there, some I’ve never tried. Worth a look!
• Fun free app: Scaniverse, by the Pokemon Go people, Niantic. 3D Gaussian splats capture places around the world. You can find scans available nearby on a map and add your own. To be honest, some of the scans are terrible, and I wish I could set a good starting viewpoint for the ones I’ve made. Here are two reasonable examples – one and two – from my neighborhood. On the technical side, they’ve open-sourced and MIT licensed their SPZ file format for compressed storage of splats, which I learned about from a talk at the Metaverse Standards Forum.
• A new cool kids’ term: vibe coding. Just hit “accept all” for whatever’s suggested by the AI chatbot and go with the flow. You can get pretty far if you’re lucky (debugging the actual code can be a nightmare), e.g., see this Shadertoy experiment by David Hart – the prompts are shown as comments in the code.