Michał Olejnik

Happy to announce that I’ll be presenting my work on Variable Rate Ray Tracing in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 as part of Advances in Real-Time Rendering at SIGGRAPH 2026. Ever since ray-tracing hardware debuted, I’ve been obsessed with trying to fix common screen-space denoising artifacts to make ray tracing viable for competitive multiplayer gameplay. VRRT is my solution: through smart on-screen ray reallocation and load balancing, we achieve a fixed frame time with no disocclusion or lag-on-movement issues. See the course page for the full abstract. #vrrt" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">advances.realtimerendering.com/s2026/index.ht…

Game is available at: oelj.itch.io/guiding-light

After this year's ZTGK (ztgk.pl) I started a little blog documenting the rendering of our game, Guiding Light. If you want to check it out, the link is here: umbc1ok.github.io

@pixelmager @bonzajplc Uploaded here 1drv.ms/f/s!AjUNxNvdNm…

@olej3d oh no, both dropbox and onedrive links are empty. Do you still have files? cc @bonzajplc

@olejplastic Mirrors: PDF - goo.gl/U140WJ Media - goo.gl/hU3WEW

After a year of hard work I’m super happy to announce that we are now officially a part of @EpicGames epicgames.com/site/en-US/new…

"Raytraced shadows in Call of Duty: MW" Digital Dragons 2020 presentation recording is now available: youtu.be/VXp-HEAw-l4, slides: research.activision.com/publications/2…, great advice for raytracing high quality shadows for local lights. #graphicslinkoftheday

@TooMuchVoltage @nholzschuch @pointinpolygon @c_schied There is nice overview on official q2rtx github (screen space only though): github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX/b… "Indirect diffuse lighting channel uses spherical harmonics. Incoming radiance is converted to YCoCg color space, and the Y component is decomposed into 4 SH coefficients."

@nholzschuch @pointinpolygon ...early, I'm careful to reset it after scene destruction to not end up with info that is too stale. The only external document I know that suggests a similar approach is: developer.download.nvidia.com/video/gputechc… esp. page 64. Maybe @c_schied can provide more insight? Q2VKPT uses SH probes AFAIK.

Instead of denoising diffuse in screenspace, use a surface cache: eliminates almost all variance. I display raw output in the beginning of each scene: try and spot noise in diffuse 🙂. Also provides directional light on bumps. Sequesters 10% per frame so it's dynamic.

@SebAaltonen LG also added low frame rate compensation in one of the software patches (frame doubling below 40hz so VRR keeps working), though I haven't seen any tests on how well this works in practice.

@olej3d Oh yes. This might be a problem for next gen consoles. Let's see whether they have another firmware patch for this. Variable refresh would indeed be nice for games that target 60 fps, but drop down to 40 fps in heaviest scenes.

LG C9 05.00.03 firmware arrived to Europe. My TV automatically installed it. This firmware fixes the G-sync issues with 120 Hz @ 4K.

@SebAaltonen I wish this could be said about next-gen console games, which will still probably be mostly 30Hz, and occasionaly 60Hz. Outside of that, C9/CX seem like ideal next-gen TVs.

@olej3d I don't think this affects me at all. Since I am not playing anything below 60 fps anyways. I would mostly use G-sync to eliminate tearing and reduce latency at 90-120 Hz range (max fps capped to 118). If a game would dip below 90 fps, I would reduce the graphics settings.

@AliBeeGfx @PawPawDH We do that on GCN with TAA, but we didn't want to make assumptions about PC hw. I tried the same trick on PC, but it broke with odd dynamic res scales (4k/1440p/1080p were ok), which suggests that interpolator res on Turing is different (IIRC our notes said it is 1/256.0 on GCN).

@olej3d @PawPawDH I was a bit suprised when I hit this problem and puzzled why no-one else had mentioned it online! I assumed I'd missed something obvious, but the offsetting seemed to do the trick :-)

Our slides for "Raytraced Shadows in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" are up! @PawPawDH research.activision.com/publications/2…

I think @olej3d, who put so much work and thought into #BoundPS4's photo mode, will be very happy seeing how extensively it's described in this review. Thank you @TheFourthFocus for your kind words! thefourthfocus.com/post/bound-pho… #VGPUnite #VirtualPhotography @SonySantaMonica

Excited to join the Activision Family! community.callofduty.com/t5/Infinity-Wa…

Announcing Infinity Ward Poland! community.callofduty.com/t5/Infinity-Wa…

Here's a cute neural network effect I'm creating. See code at github.com/mare85/code/tr…

@CasualEffects UE4 has a nice educational uber-shader (uber-header?) and VRWorks has an optimized compute implementation (algorithmically similar to MJP's)

@CasualEffects github.com/TheRealMJP/MSA… best open-source reference (with bonus MSAA resolve), consider adding 5-tap CatmullRom and clipping in YCoCg

@SebAaltonen @BrianKaris I did have a big boost after switching to 5-tap Catmull-Rom (like in @iryoku1's Filmic SMAA) but I see UE4 did that too some time ago.

@SebAaltonen @BrianKaris Currently clipping in RGB though, so maybe after switch to YCoCg + tonemap compute will be faster.