REAC 2025 Evolving Global Illumination in Overwatch 2.

Will Pearce discusses the Overwatch team's journey updating their global illumination solution to a modern approach.

Global illumination (GI) for any modern game is a tricky, complex, and nuanced topic. No matter the approach, there are numerous tradeoffs in terms of quality, performance, and workflow. This talk aims to cover the Overwatch team's journey to update the GI solution that has served us for almost a decade into a more modern approach that provides a smoother, faster workflow for our artists, while maintaining the overall visual quality and performance our players have come to expect from our game. We will discuss where we started, where we currently are on our journey, and what's left on the road ahead. Also covered will be the tradeoffs and challenges we have encountered along the way, including how we worked through them to ensure a solid experience across our incredibly broad range of supported hardware. Speaker: Will Pearce is a Senior Software Engineer II at Blizzard Entertainment. He has been with Blizzard on the Overwatch team since 2020 and has over 16 years of experience as a software engineer. Will has spent his time at Blizzard building and improving rendering features for Overwatch and Overwatch 2, including surface deformation, volumetric effects, new BRDFs, temporal super-resolution, and global illumination, while also supporting a live service game.