Ignacio Castaño, a self-taught graphics programmer from Spain, shares his career journey from writing code on paper as a teenager to working at Crytek, Nvidia, Oddworld, and Jonathan Blow's studio on The Witness. He discusses his work on GPU tessellation hardware at Nvidia, fast compilation experiences with the Jai language, and introduces Spark — a real-time GPU texture encoder designed to compress textures on the fly rather than offline. The motivation for Spark came from his time at Roblox, where user-generated content created uncompressed textures that consumed excessive GPU memory, especially on mobile devices. He also shares technical insights on GPU-friendly texture formats, why JPEG-style entropy-encoded formats don't work for GPUs, and various rendering techniques he developed including alpha-to-coverage mipmap generation and Gaussian shadow filtering.
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