Michał Olejnik

Rendering Engineer @ Infinity Ward Poland
Ray Tracing @ Activision

[Michał Olejnik @olej3d]

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.

https://t.co/Smum3bEYpo

[Hubert Olejnik @umbc1ok]

Game is available at:
https://t.co/Yr5w0r0TyZ

[Hubert Olejnik @umbc1ok]

After this year's ZTGK (https://t.co/MfaenSo6QX) I started a little blog documenting the rendering of our game, Guiding Light. If you want to check it out, the link is here: https://t.co/vVDjG86AJS

[Michał Olejnik @olej3d]

@pixelmager @bonzajplc Uploaded here https://t.co/bmzp0cOIWu

[Michał Olejnik @olej3d]

@olejplastic Mirrors: PDF - https://t.co/1RGGwrYKIt Media - https://t.co/cPaQ6LpSTs

[bonzaj/plastic @bonzajplc]

After a year of hard work I’m super happy to announce that we are now officially a part of @EpicGames https://t.co/zO83KPz7Fi

[Kostas Anagnostou @KostasAAA]

"Raytraced shadows in Call of Duty: MW" Digital Dragons 2020 presentation recording is now available: https://t.co/XMHtip4Pvd, slides: https://t.co/WGs16W3GJ2, great advice for raytracing high quality shadows for local lights. #graphicslinkoftheday

[Michał Olejnik @olej3d]

@TooMuchVoltage @nholzschuch @pointinpolygon @c_schied There is nice overview on official q2rtx github (screen space only though): https://t.co/W8cTrkFhu8 "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."

[Michał Olejnik @olej3d]

@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.

[Michał Olejnik @olej3d]

@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.

[Michał Olejnik @olej3d]

@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).

[Michał Olejnik @olej3d]

Our slides for "Raytraced Shadows in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" are up! @PawPawDH https://t.co/MZvHUhkUvg

[Adam Dębski | Game Dev @Nox_A15]

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! https://t.co/C3G9laf9V6
#VGPUnite #VirtualPhotography @SonySantaMonica

[Infinity Ward Poland @InfinityWardPL]

Excited to join the Activision Family! https://t.co/bUfqE9XWil

[Infinity Ward @InfinityWard]

Announcing Infinity Ward Poland!

https://t.co/PKgtG6LDJj

[Marek Bielawski @marek_bielawski]

Here's a cute neural network effect I'm creating. See code at
https://t.co/5QINhmbPiA

[Michał Olejnik @olej3d]

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

[Michał Olejnik @olej3d]

@CasualEffects https://t.co/U7DpRyJ49Q best open-source reference (with bonus MSAA resolve), consider adding 5-tap CatmullRom and clipping in YCoCg

[Michał Olejnik @olej3d]

@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.

[Michał Olejnik @olej3d]

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