Rendering has developed considerably over time. We’ve made huge leaps from Pixar’s pre-rendered experiments within the movie industry in 1987 to modern day 3D, real-time rendered video games like Destiny and For Honor. However, there are still issues with jaggies, broken shadows, specular aliasing, and texture noise that need to be addressed within the rendering world. These issues have become the sworn enemies of Hao Chen, Senior Principal Engineer with Amazon.

Over the years, Chen has worked on solving complex problems with video game rendering. He was the Senior Graphics Architect at Bungie’s Destiny, where he worked alongside some of the best real-time graphics engineers in the industry. If you’re interested in his work, please check out an interview he conducted for GDC 2017.

We often sacrifice pixel quality. PC games usually have that typical ‘PC game look.’ Very noisy, very aliasing. Jaggies. Gamers actually came to accept these defects. But, I think now is the time to tackle pixel quality because the power efficiency of the geometry engine is very, very good and it’s going to help improve the throughput.

If you take a look at my career, at all the games I’ve worked on over the years, you can see that the throughput progressed immensely. We’ve observed a 5000x increase of polygon count. In terms of pixel resolution, we have 54x more pixels. And it’s still growing with the introduction of 4K and 8K displays.

Hao Chen