Jacco Bikker 🎦
@jbikker
Interests: Graphics 🖼️, Game development 🕹️, Retrodev (MSX / MSX2) 👾. Ray Tracing 📈! Also interested in, but not posting on: Teaching 🎓, piano 𝄞, marriage 🧑🏻🤝🧑🏻, Christianity ✝.
Received an awesome custom joypad earlier this week from 𝐑𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐁𝐨𝐲𝐳! It is fully customized for the MSXDev25 game DELTA (ranked #5 in the contest). DELTA is a 3D game for the 8-bit MSX2 platform (Z80). The joypad oozes quality... And it looks gorgeous. Very impressed and grateful!
TinyBVH has just been 𝘂𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝟭.𝟴.𝟬. For CPU ray tracing, it is now the fastest option in most cases - Outperforming Intel Embree and Madmann91 for BVH build time and single-ray performance. On GPU, performance exceeds 4B rays per second - 4 rays per pixel at 4k/120Hz. github.com/jbikker/tiny...
On LinkedIn, Neville Marcinkowski posted a trailer of all the student work that was on show at the Industry Showcase event of BUas Games, yesterday, Breda, the Netherlands. Good things are happening here!
Behold our awesome campus at BUas. Perhaps you remember the place that hosted the first #GPC. Yesterday: "Industry Showcase Day". Filled to the brim with students (#thisisigad!), lecturers (almost all from industry!) and of course industry, looking for interns. :) What a place. One of a kind.
Cool upcoming SIGGRAPH 2026 paper on improved ReSTIR PT by Shi at al.: hercier.github.io/restcv/
𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗶𝗻𝘆𝗕𝗩𝗛? TinyBVH is free software. That also means it can be hard to track how it is used 'in the wild'. If your company uses TinyBVH, and you don't mind sharing this info, can you let me know? It would greatly help! No pressure, of course. :)
Our Y1 IGAD programming students just finished the Ray Tracing block. After the basics, many added depth of field, path tracing, reprojection, filtering (including SVGF), a Teardown-style TLAS, and much more. (by the way.. You can still sign up for CMGT/BUas before May 1st - be quick!) #thisisigad
The #MSX2 game DELTA (entry #30 for #MSXDev25) has been patched to v1.01 to address many of the gameplay concerns: Track layouts have improved, insta-deaths replaced by an energy bar and much more. Scores can be shared online via qr-codes as well! Play v1.01 here: www.file-hunter.com/MSXdev/?id=d...
DELTA for #MSX2 is now available to play: www.file-hunter.com/MSXdev/?id=d... Developed together with Peter van Dranen of Breda University, DELTA is a full 3D game for an 1986 8-bit platform, running at 20fps. This uses an 8MB ROM and Konami's custom sound chip.
Dutch news NOS today shows an MSX2 on their frontpage. :) Celebrating 40 years of electronic banking. It's a Philips VG-8235, a rather pretty device.
Marcin Zalewski informed me that his blog post on real-time hair rendering using ray tracing is now available: mmzala.github.io/blog/hair-ge... This is nice work, in which he compares NVidia's hardware accelerated hair to several alternatives, including Reshetov's Phantom Ray Hair Intersector.
Over the past 8 weeks our IGAD year 1 students of Breda University worked (solo!) on a Minecraft clone using C++ and OpenGL on PC and Raspberry Pi 4. The video shows work by Toby, Oleg, Fernando, Niels and Alan. Visit us for info about our game dev program or to apply for 26/27: www.buas.nl/en
Posting an older article on "Probability Theory for Physically Based Rendering", using tomorrow's #thisisigad Graphics Guild lecture as an excuse: jacco.ompf2.com/2019/12/11/p... There is also a part 2.
Ke-Sen Huang has a large batch of SIGGRAPH Asia papers today: www.realtimerendering.com/kesen/siga20... Among them: "ReSTIR PG: Path Guiding with Spatiotemporally Resampled Paths" by Zeng et al., which describes a *real-time* framework combining ReSTIR PT and path guiding.
The toolchain for the upcoming #MSX2 action game "DELTA" (Dodge! Engage! Launch! Target! ASSAULT!) includes BlockBench. Retro itself, but not the typical utility for an 80s platform. :) @blockbench.net
Today in the Graphics Guild of Breda University: Going 3D on a 1984 platform. By cheating, obviously. #MSX #thisisigad
Stumbled upon this by accident: SideFX Houdini 21.0 is using TinyBVH. www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini... www.sidefx.com/docs/hdk/_c_... Not sure what it is used for precisely, but it's pretty cool nevertheless!
Just stumbled upon this ancient PcPersective article on real-time ray tracing.. In 2008. :) pcper.com/2008/06/ray-... It details the story of nine students (Karim, Wussie, Rick, Jan, Rutger, Trevor, Mathijs, Roel, Wilco) who worked in various roles on CPU-ray traced games using the Arauna engine.
NVIDIA's new hair tech seems a bit weird. It accelerates "linear swept spheres", and it looks "smooth from a distance". Anything does, NVIDIA. But, why didn't you implement the commonly used "Phantom Ray-Hair Intersector" (cheap spline hair)? And why is this fixed functionality in the first place?
It's summer and TinyBVH updates are slow, but something cool happened nevetheless: Florent Le Moël sends word that Python bindings for TinyBVH are now available. Check out the repo: github.com/FlorentLM/py... Great stuff!
After some responses here I tried Fedora. This is with default options, installing to 500GB unallocated space on an SSD that contains Windows in the allocated space. Sigh.
Got some sweet lego souvenir at HPG. And: Found a totally unrelated but cool minion at a thrift shop today. Ok, back to ray tracing. :)
Enjoying a presentation by Peter Shirley of "Spherical Harmonic Exponentials for Efficient Glossy Reflections" by Silvernoinen et al., at #HPG2025. Great presenter & idea.
Saw that "The Witcher 4" UE5 tech demo with the voxel trees for fast rendering at a distance? I figured... that should be easy to do in TinyBVH. :) So now TinyBVH can do voxel meshes. Attached video: CPU-only, switching between BVH and voxels. Code in tiny_bvh_foliage.cpp: github.com/jbikker/tiny...
New in the TinyBVH dev branch: threaded building. All builders (except full sweep) just got 3x faster, assuming you're not running them in parallel. github.com/jbikker/tiny...
TinyBVH has been updated to 1.5.6 on the main branch. This release brings two new examples: * Minimal OpenGL / compute shader traversal example * OpenCL TLAS/BLAS 'tinyscene' demo (see video). Example 2 uses Lighthouse 2 scene data with materials and full GLTF animation. github.com/jbikker/tiny...
Now available: A blog post on (S)BVH optimization. The article describes how to improve beyond SBVH quality, often significantly. Results are compared to full-sweep, binned SAH and the H-PLOC. In short: Off-line BVH construction can double ray tracing performance. jacco.ompf2.com/2025/05/20/b...