Ignacio Castaño

I’m a graphics programmer with a background in GPU architecture and real-time rendering.

I’ve been developing games since the days of flipcode and the gd-algorithms mailing list, and I I've worked across a wide range of companies, including Crytek, Relic, Oddworld, NVIDIA, Thekla, and Roblox.

What brings me most satisfaction is developing tools and techniques that have industry-wide impact.

I'm most proud of the work I did on The Witness, not just because of its reception, but because of the amazing team we assembled and the freedom I had to develop new techniques for global illumination, shadow mapping, texture processing , and lightmap compression.

At NVIDIA, I pioneered the use of GPUs for texture compression and developed the GPU-accelerated NVIDIA Texture Tools which gained wide adoption in the game industry. I also had an influential role in the design of the hardware tessellation pipeline and invented many of the techniques that run on it.

As a side effect of this work, I've written papers, organized courses, edited books, and given talks, but I'm most comfortable in a focused environment solving problems that advance the state of the art.

Ludicon is my attempt to create the environment where I can do my best work.