Agenda

How do you deliver the pinnacle of lighting technologies to a racing game engine and ship in a yearly cycle? In this session, Tom Hammersley, Principal Engineer at EA Codemasters, shares how two senior engineers built a path tracer on EGO, the bespoke racing game engine that powers EA SPORTS F1® titles without having to change a decade of art… and shipped it in 12 months.

Tom shares insights from throughout the journey of shipping EA SPORTS F1® 25's "Ultra Max" quality mode, including real challenges and real solutions.

With practical tips on shortcuts, optimizations and lessons learned, this session will show you what it took to get to the finish line, and how you can do it too.

Takeaway

We aim to give you an understanding of what a path tracer is and how to build one without needing to redevelop your art pipelines.

Sharing our experience of issues during adoption, and the solutions we developed so that you can get a head-start on your journey.

There's discussion on ML techniques available across different GPUs that make path tracing a viable option, even when you move through the world at 200mph. Plus insights into how we applied the latest research to overcome challenges like solving for 300,000 lights in real time.

You should come away with practical tips on how to use the code and art you already have to make a huge leap forward in image lighting - and ship!

Intended Audience

The talk is aimed at graphics engineers, technical artists and technical directors who are interested in path tracing and adopting it for their engine or title, and want to see how that actually goes when you try.