Bart Wronski 🇺🇦🇵🇸I am excited to finally share our recent paper "Filtering After Shading With Stochastic Texture Filtering" (with @mattpharr @marcosalvi and Marcos Fajardo), published at ACM I3D'24 / PACM CGIT, where we won the best paper award! 1/N
Aras Pranckevičius@BartWronski ah, I remember a year or two ago you were asking around about Unreal jittered sampling and other “strange” texture filtering approaches. Now we know where all that went! Really nice!
@aras yes, we had a tech report with our initial findings and a ton of folks reported some great precedents in old games. We knew of all the academic literature, but game developers just use them and often not even report. :)
The coolest example was this old Star Trek game and the first Unreal, we had no idea! This helped us a lot to contextualize our research. :)
Game developers, please report your findings and even "hacks"! :)
@aras Even if writing a full paper might seem intimidating and a ton of work (plus sometimes dealing with gatekeeping reviewers), GDC or Siggraph "Advances" presentations, blog posts, JCGT articles or arXiv tech reports are good enough to find and reference and much easier to write. :)
@BartWronski there’s at least 10x effort (and prestige?) difference between a blog post and a GDC/Siggraph talk, but yes even a blog post is 1000x better than nothing. From personal experience though, “hey I found a gross hack!” the first instinct is to *not* write about it :) But of course you have no idea if your “gross hack” is actually a sensible application of a theory that has not been formulated yet.
@BartWronski your paper is a perfect blend of “proper literature” and “documenting gamedev practices” by the way. The latter is very often not well documented or even understood (I’m sure you are aware of a million reasons why :)). But it is curious that production environment sometimes stumbles upon actually sound theory by accident, without realizing it.
@aras I had this observation in an older blog post of mine that artists manually sharpening mipmaps (which seemed like a gross hack) is actually an intuitive compensation for ugly bilinear filter and correct, best-fit optimization-based solution gives similar results :) https://bartwronski.com/2021/07/20/processing-aware-image-filtering-compensating-for-the-upsampling/
demofox@BartWronski @aras artists are smarter than we give them credit for. I'm pretty sure incorrect lighting falloff was making up for the renders not being sRGB correct :P
@demofox @BartWronski definitely. But my point is, in gamedev (or generally outside of "research"), many of these things are not because someone wanted to find a theory; they are because someone wanted to save half a millisecond. I'm 99% sure stochastic mip sampling happened in gamedev only because of in a virtual texturing system manually doing full trilinear is very costly. Someone had an idea of random mip choice, and went "hey that does not look too bad!" and so it shipped.
@demofox @BartWronski which again is why I'm very happy for paper like this (and a handful of others) that "bring industries together". I think Bart mentioned it too, but many graphics people are blissfully unaware of most of signal processing things done by audio people, for example. It might be useful! (or it might not, lol)
@aras @BartWronski Yeah, Bart is a mensch haha. & I love that the best research comes from people that are well versed in both worlds.
@demofox @aras switching fields for almost 5y helped me a lot :) I would kind of recommend it to everyone (assuming they are ok with re-starting almost from scratch...). The terminology difference was funny ("what the hell is optical flow? oh, you mean motion vectors?"), but I contributed knowhow from games and graphics to some CV/ML research and camera products. :)
"What do you mean games already do robust temporal multi-frame super-resolution???"
"What do you mean games already do robust temporal multi-frame super-resolution???"
@BartWronski @demofox "What do you mean games already do robust temporal multi-frame super-resolution???" is funny. It goes the other way too though, like half of all the ECS stuffs within gamedev are along the lines of "ok so you've invented an extremely limited relational database, right" and they go "what's a relational database?" :)
@BartWronski @demofox complete topic jump, but thanks Bart and Alan for this "discussion" right here. Since 2020 I've been pretty much sitting at home and working in isolation, and right now I'm on the brink of spiralling into some depression episode and/or realizing how much I miss in-person discussions. This one is not in-person, but still. Thanks.
Jon Valdés@BartWronski @aras @demofox yep, I've done two work from home stints (one in 2010, another in 2020), and I burned out both times.
Aras, take care of yourself, it's easy to end up in a bad spot
About all the folks saying "come visit!" around here, every rendering team on the planet would love to have you show up at their office for a week and have random discussions over lunch.
You could really start the nerdiest world tour ever. And we'd all love it 😄
Leszek Godlewski@jon_valdes @BartWronski @aras @demofox indeed, that's a pretty awesome idea. And I'm sure it could even be crowd-funded!
For now, maybe saving the date for https://www.graphicsprogrammingconference.nl/ is a good step? 🙂
Maciej Sinilo@TheIneQuation @jon_valdes @BartWronski @aras @demofox Digital Dragons, too, not far from Aras, but I think in 2 days so maybe not enough heads up :) It's a cool little conference though
@msinilo @jon_valdes @BartWronski @aras @demofox it's grown too big for its own good, though. Last year I had trouble seeking out friends in the crowd, and the party venue has been too small to accommodate everyone who wants to get in for a number of years now.
@TheIneQuation @jon_valdes @BartWronski @aras @demofox Ah interesting. Last one I've attended was, uh, 2017 I think. Sounds like that's just how it goes though, GDC was actually a nice little conf back in 2000s 😆
@msinilo @jon_valdes @BartWronski @aras @demofox http://www.gic.gd/ on the other hand still has some room to grow. And I'm no longer on the program board, so there's no conflict of interest in bragging! 😜