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Arseny Kapoulkine (email, 
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If you like this blog, you should follow it via RSS and read older posts. Here are the recent posts:
Arseny Kapoulkine (email, , )
Work, projects and publications
If you like this blog, you should follow it via RSS and read older posts. Here are the recent posts:
My name is Arseny Kapoulkine and this is my blog where I write about computer graphics, optimization, programming languages and related topics. I’m the author of pugixml, meshoptimizer, volk and other projects.
I’ve been working on speeding up AVX-512 vertex decoding in meshoptimizer recently; in the process I stumbled upon two optimizations that I did not end up using but I thought they might be fun to write about! The optimizations that actually made it in require some higher level background / explanations that will have to wait until another day :)
I’ve been working on tangent space generation recently, and also pondering the tradeoffs between QTangent and normal-angle storage. So when, in a completely unrelated discussion, someone said “you could store tangent and normal as two RGB10A2 attributes”, I decided I should measure this once and for all and write it up.
A short post today. If you’re following me on any of the vast array of social accounts then you’re probably aware, but if you’re reading this blog through the ancient technology otherwise known as RSS, meshoptimizer v1.0 has been released yesterday!
Early this year, NVIDIA released their new raytracing technology, RTX Mega Geometry, alongside an impressive Zorah demo. This demo was distributed as a ~100 GB Unreal Engine scene - that can only be opened in a special branch of Unreal Engine, NvRTX. The demo showcased the application of new driver-exposed raytracing features, specifically clustered raytracing, in combination with Nanite clustered LOD pipeline - allowing to stream and display a very highly detailed scene with full raytracing without using the Nanite proxy meshes that Unreal Engine currently generates for raytracing.
As this was too Unreal Engine specific for me, I couldn’t really experiment much with this - but then, in early September, NVIDIA released an update to their vk_lod_clusters open-source sample, that - among other things - featured Zorah scene as a glTF file. Naturally, this piqued my curiosity - and led me to spend a fair amount of time to improve support for hierarchical clustered LOD in meshoptimizer.
Some people have a misconception that in software engineering, skill stops mattering for code quality from some level of seniority, and all of the value add shifts to architecture, high level design decisions, problem setting, or guiding others. And as long as you have staff/senior engineers design a system and oversee mid-level - and, for some work, junior - engineers, the output quality is the same as if you got senior folks to write everything instead.