index.html Notes on real-time rendering, written while building and studying it. en posts/next-study-plan-cuda-kernels-attention.htmlposts/next-study-plan-cuda-kernels-attention.html Wed, 23 Dec 2026 00:00:00 GMT Retrospective — written in 2026, looking back. Starting Again, On Purpose Every post in this series so far has been retrospective — knowledge I already have, organized. This last one is different. It is a study plan,… posts/five-principles.htmlposts/five-principles.html Fri, 18 Dec 2026 00:00:00 GMT Retrospective — written in 2026, looking back. A Series, Compressed This series started as a look back at what rendering work had actually taught me, as opposed to what I assumed it would. Across posts on physically… posts/why-im-building-a-custom-engine-again.htmlposts/why-im-building-a-custom-engine-again.html Sun, 13 Dec 2026 00:00:00 GMT Retrospective — written in 2026, looking back. A Question I Keep Getting Asked, Mostly by Myself Every few months I ask it again, usually at midnight, usually while debugging something an off-the-shelf engine would have… posts/post-processing-is-where-taste-lives.htmlposts/post-processing-is-where-taste-lives.html Tue, 08 Dec 2026 00:00:00 GMT Retrospective — written in 2026, looking back. The Last Ten Percent That Reads as Ninety Most of a renderer is correctness work. A shadow map either leaks or it doesn't. A normal is either in the right space or the… posts/rendering-under-tight-budgets.htmlposts/rendering-under-tight-budgets.html Thu, 03 Dec 2026 00:00:00 GMT Retrospective — written in 2026, looking back. On a large machine, rendering budgets feel abstract. There is headroom, and headroom forgives. On a small device — a handheld, a battery-powered prototype board, a modest… posts/draw-calls-state-changes-invisible-costs.htmlposts/draw-calls-state-changes-invisible-costs.html Sat, 28 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT Retrospective — written in 2026, looking back. Open a profiler on a slow frame and the eye goes straight to the biggest draws: the million-triangle mesh, the fullscreen pass with the heavy shader. Those are the visible… posts/stop-guessing-profiling-habit.htmlposts/stop-guessing-profiling-habit.html Mon, 23 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT Retrospective — written in 2026, looking back. Every graphics programmer I know, including me, has a story about optimizing the wrong thing. Mine follow a pattern: a frame feels slow, I form a confident theory from the… posts/lighting-models-break-at-the-edges.htmlposts/lighting-models-break-at-the-edges.html Wed, 18 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT Retrospective — written in 2026, looking back. Most lighting models look convincing in the middle of their parameter space. Put a moderately rough, non-metallic sphere under a soft light, pointed more or less at the… posts/materials-are-data.htmlposts/materials-are-data.html Fri, 13 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT Retrospective — written in 2026, looking back. The Shader-Per-Material Trap Early in my personal rendering experiments, every distinct surface got its own shader. A rough metal needed a highlight tweak, so I copied the… posts/shadows-are-a-budget-problem.htmlposts/shadows-are-a-budget-problem.html Sun, 08 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT Retrospective — written in 2026, looking back. The Wrong Question For a long time, when a shadow looked bad in a personal project, I asked: how do I make this shadow higher quality? The answers that invites are all… posts/first-shader-i-understood.htmlposts/first-shader-i-understood.html Tue, 03 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT Retrospective — written in 2026, looking back. Copying Is Not Understanding For a long time, every lighting shader I wrote was copied — not always literally copy-pasted, but copied in structure. I knew diffuse involved… posts/building-my-first-renderer.htmlposts/building-my-first-renderer.html Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Retrospective — written in 2026, looking back. The Renderer I Imagined When I started studying graphics at DigiPen, I thought a renderer was a collection of effects. Draw triangles, add lighting, shadows, reflections —…