Two Decades of Progress in a Frame: SIGGRAPH's Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games Turns 20

Now Entering Its Third Decade, SIGGRAPH's Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games Course has Become the Premier Forum for Unveiling Cutting-edge Rendering Techniques That Power the Real-time Experiences of Today and Tomorrow.

VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- SIGGRAPH 2025, taking place 10-14 August at the Vancouver Convention Centre, marks a milestone in the world of computer graphics with the 20th anniversary of the Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course, one of the most enduring and influential innovation forums in computer graphics. Since its debut in 2006, the course has served as a launchpad for groundbreaking rendering techniques that have fundamentally reshaped how artists, rendering engineers, and game developers simulate lighting, geometry, and motion in real-time applications, especially in video games.

What began as a grassroots effort to bring together rendering engineers, game developers, and technical artists, has evolved into a global forum that bridges latest research insight with industry innovation and execution. The program has consistently spotlighted state-of-the-art techniques shaping the evolution of video games, virtual productions, architectural visualization, and interactive experiences at scale.

"Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games endures because it's more than a technical session, it's a living time capsule of the state of real-time rendering," said Natalya Tatarchuk, CTO of Activision, the longtime program organizer. "Every year, we bring together the visionaries, the tinkerers, the optimists who believe that you can push one more millisecond, one more polygon, one more texture. That culture of shared exploration is what makes it meaningful. It's a celebration of curiosity made concrete."

A Legacy of Innovation
Initially created to fill a gap in knowledge-sharing for game developers and real-time rendering practitioners, Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games now influences the pipelines of top studios and game engines alike. The program has introduced many of the field's most transformative techniques, from screen-space ambient occlusion and physically based lighting to GPU-driven pipelines and neural-based global illumination, often years before they became mainstream.

Key moments include the introduction of screen-space ambient occlusion by Crytek, which has become a foundational technique across real-time graphics, the debut of temporal anti-aliasing, the early exploration of compute-based rendering pipelines by Alex Evans, and groundbreaking GPU-driven pipeline talks from AMD and Ubisoft. More recently, innovations in  global illumination (including using machine learning and neural compression) from Activision, along with production insights from technical artists at studios like Naughty Dog, just to name a few presented at the forum, have highlighted the course's consistent focus: showcasing not just novel techniques, but production-tested solutions shaped by real-world constraints.

"Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games doesn't just spotlight the victories of innovation, the program dives deeper," Tatarchuk explained. "We explore the limitations, we surface the intuition behind the techniques, and share the tradeoffs behind the choices made, talking openly about what didn't work and why. That culture of shared exploration is what makes Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games meaningful, it's a place where we all learn together, not just from success, but from the honest, hard-earned lessons, too."

2025 Lineup
This year's two-part course, held on Tuesday, 12 August, in the morning and afternoon, will feature a special 20-year retrospective by Tatarchuk, along with the following cutting-edge presentations:

• Activision will present a novel solution for order-independent transparency developed for "Call of Duty®", addressing a longstanding challenge in real-time graphics with a scalable and performant algorithm tailored for unpredictable player-driven scenes.
• Ubisoft will share technical insights from "Assassin's Creed Shadows", where the team successfully merged ray tracing and global illumination techniques within a complex open-world pipeline, showcasing the intersection of cinematic quality and expansive interactivity.
• MachineGames will reveal how it achieved film-quality rendering at 60+ frames per second across platforms in "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" using strand-based hair as the sole solution for human hair, leveraging GPU optimizations to deliver film-quality visuals across a wide range of hardware.
• id Software will showcase how idTech 8's real-time global illumination replaced pre-baked lighting to accelerate workflows, boost artistic flexibility, and power "DOOM: The Dark Age" at 60Hz or higher on all platforms.
• HypeHype will present a novel stochastic tile-based lighting algorithm that enables fully dynamic, fixed-cost local lighting with shadows, even on low-end mobile GPUs, empowering user-generated content across devices by delivering high-performance, scalable lighting with minimal technical overhead for creators.
• NVIDIA will unveil a hybrid real-time subsurface scattering technique that combines volumetric path tracing and a new physically based diffusion model, enhanced with ReSTIR sampling, to deliver near path-traced quality for lifelike skin and translucent materials at interactive frame rates.
• Epic Games will showcase MegaLights, a new stochastic direct lighting system in Unreal Engine 5 that enables artists to place vastly more dynamic, shadowed area lights while maintaining performance and realism on ray-tracing-enabled platforms and current-gen consoles through a fully scalable, hardware-conscious pipeline.

Looking Forward: The Next Era of Real-Time
As the Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course enters its third decade, the field faces both complexity and opportunity. "We are  at a significant inflection point. We haven't yet exhausted the potential of traditional GPU pipelines, and we're still learning how to better parallelize and scale real-time systems for truly dynamic content," said Tatarchuk. "At the same time, we're facing increasing platform fragmentation, which means we need rendering solutions that are deeply scalable, capable of delivering consistent fidelity across a vast range of hardware generations. And then there's generative AI, which is the wild card."

With advancements in generative AI, real-time pipelines could be poised for disruption. Meanwhile, real-time methods originally forged for gaming are increasingly influencing film, virtual production, and simulation, a cross-pollination first envisioned in the program's earliest days.

"The one thing that hasn't changed, and for Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games it is non-negotiable, is that every frame is still built under a promise that it will respond to the player; that their interaction matters, and it isn't predetermined," Tatarchuk explained. "That is the core of what we mean by real-time. And that is why the field, in my opinion, remains so creatively and technically exciting and challenging."

To dive deeper into the evolution and future of real-time rendering in games, listen to "SIGGRAPH Spotlight: Episode 76 – Creating a Lasting Impact With Real-Time Rendering", featuring program organizer Natalya Tatarchuk, and explore the full Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games schedule at advances.realtimerendering.com/s2025.

About ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, and SIGGRAPH 2025
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field's challenges.  SIGGRAPH is a special interest group within ACM that serves as an interdisciplinary community for members in research, technology, and applications in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The SIGGRAPH conference is the world's leading annual interdisciplinary educational experience showcasing the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques. SIGGRAPH 2025, the 52nd annual conference hosted by ACM SIGGRAPH, will take place live 10–14 August at the Vancouver Convention Centre, along with a Virtual Access option.

SOURCE SIGGRAPH 2025