A Certain Slant of Light

Global Illumination (GI) has been an ongoing quest in games. The perpetual tug-of-war between visual quality and performance often forces developers to take the latest and greatest from academia and tailor it to push the boundaries of what has been realized in a game product. Many elements need to align for success, including image quality, performance, scalability, interactivity, ease of use, as well as game-specific and production challenges.

In this presentation, SEED's Colin Barré-Brisebois paints a picture of the current state of global illumination in games, addressing how the state of the union compares to the latest and greatest research.
He then explores various GI challenges that game teams face from the art, engineering, pipelines and production perspective. The games industry lacks an ideal solution, so the goal here is to raise awareness by being transparent about the real problems in the field.
Finally, Colin talks about the future. This is a call to arms, with the objective of uniting game developers and researchers on the same quest to evolve global illumination in games from being mostly static, or sometimes perceptually real-time, to fully real-time.

This presentation was originally created for the Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering course for SIGGRAPH 2017.

A Certain Slant of Light - Past, Present and Future Challenges of Global Illumination in Games from Electronic Arts / DICE