Leszek Godlewski

Hello! I'm a software engineer with a background in the game development industry. My field of interest is real-time rendering; in other words, making pretty pixels fast. I thrive on processing large amounts of data, at throughputs approaching the theoretical maximum. Visual feedback is a nice bonus.

I take pride in professionalism, dedication to making informed decisions based on data, finding non-obvious links between information from a broad body of knowledge, and proper engineering for the rest of the team to rely on.

Stockholm, Sweden
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lg＠inequation.org
inequation.org
＠TheIneQuation＠mastodon.gamedev.place
linkedin.com/in/lgodlewski
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github.com/inequation
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mobygames.com/person/548859
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Experience

Senior Raytracing System Software Engineer

NVIDIA 		December 2023 – Present

Development and maintenance of the RTX runtime in the driver.

Rendering Engineer

Frostbite 		April 2021 – December 2023

Development and maintenance of image quality features (i.e. techniques directly contributing to the output image pixels) within rendering, with a focus on reliability and performance. Formalised the de facto transfer from April 2019.

Projects

  • Battlefield 2042 (2021) for Win/XBSX/PS5/XB1/PS4 - bespoke work
  • Dead Space (2023 remake) for Win/XBSX/PS5 - bespoke work
  • Other Frostbite-based games - accumulated work

Rendering Engineer

EA DICE/Frostbite 		April 2018 – April 2021

Development and maintenance of all sorts of rendering systems, with a focus on stability (i.e. monitoring MTBF in production) and performance. De-facto transferred to the Image Quality cell of the Frostbite Rendering team as of April 2019.

Projects

  • Star Wars Battlefront II (2017; live service) for Win/XB1/PS4 - bespoke work
  • Battlefield V (2018; live service) for Win/XB1/PS4 - bespoke work
  • FIFA 21 (2020) for PS5/XBSX - bespoke work
  • Other Frostbite-based games - accumulated work

Engine Programmer

Starbreeze Studios 		May 2017 – April 2018

Somewhat accidentally ended up in ownership of engine stability. Worked deep within the Unreal Engine 4 UObject model, UPackages, Blueprint implementation. Contributed minor rendering features.

Projects

  • OVERKILL's The Walking Dead (2018, then delisted) for Windows
  • Project Crossfire (cancelled as of 2019)

Lead Programmer

Flying Wild Hog Cracow 		Dec 2015 – May 2017

Leading all things technical at the Kraków branch of the company for the project that would eventually become Space Punks. Engine/renderer programming on most days; IT administration & support, mentoring and recruiting on others. Unreal Engine 4.

Projects

  • Space Punks (2021) for Win (before the game had received this name)

Engine Programmer

The Astronauts 		Nov 2014 – Dec 2015

Hacking the Unreal Engine 4 renderer to meet performance targets, and the needs and wants of our artists. Miscellaneous engine-side work as well. Probably the first shipped forward-rendered Unreal Engine 4 game.

Projects

  • The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (2015) for PS4/Win (Redux version)/VR

Porting Programmer

Nordic Games, Freelance 		Sep 2013 – Nov 2014

Linux ports and other generalist programming.

Projects

  • Darksiders port for Linux/Mac (Nordic Games)
  • Deadfall Adventures & Painkiller Hell & Damnation ports for Linux (contracted by The Farm 51)

Generalist Programmer

The Farm 51 		Mar 2010 – Aug 2013

Generalist programmer. Started in gameplay, then took on shaders & engine. Unreal Engine 3 used throughout.

Projects

  • Deadfall Adventures (2013) for Win/X360
  • Painkiller Hell & Damnation (2012) for Win/X360/PS3/Linux
  • Alien Fear (2010; cancelled) for Win/X360/PS3

Selected Skills

  • System programming in C/C++/Rust
  • Graphics and GPU compute APIs (D3D, Vulkan, CUDA)
  • Shader programming (HLSL, GLSL)
  • Deep knowledge of CPU and GPU architectures, especially x86-64 and AMD GCN/RDNA
  • Graphics rendering techniques: geometry processing, shading, light transport simulation

Education

Master of Computer Science

Silesian University of Technology 		Feb 2013 – Sep 2014

Majoring in Interactive 3D Graphics. Thesis subject: Parallelization of Existing Game Logic Code (impl. 2 techniques in the Quake III codebase).

Bachelor of Computer Science

Silesian University of Technology 		Oct 2009 – Jan 2013

Majoring in Computer Graphics and Software. Thesis subject: High-Performance Particle Effect System (modular, retargetable back-ends, sample back-end for JIT x86/64 assembly).

Publications

Bringing shaders to contest programming

 Blog post

Graphics programming has not been a domain prominently featured in programming contests up until now, in no small part due to difficulty in grading code quality. We present a practical method for running a contest in shader programming with automatic judging, as well as report findings from the first edition of such a contest.

The Vanishing of Milliseconds

Optimizing the UE4 renderer for Ethan Carter VR 		Blog post

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, with its rich visuals and a graphics workload somewhat uncommon for Unreal Engine 4, has been a difficult case for attaining VR perf targets. This is a story of scraping off frame render time, microsecond by microsecond.

Advanced Linux Game Programming

 GDC Europe 2014

Ever since the advent of SteamOS, interest in game development for Linux has seen an increase. This lecture aims to address some more advanced issues encountered by programmers on this platform, beyond the very basic Linux setup, and drawing from over a year and two and a half games of experience in the subject. The areas discussed will be:

One year of porting

Post mortem of two Linux/SteamOS launches 		Digital Dragons 2014

2013 was the year in which Linux finally got the attention of game developers; it was also the year in which my first two Linux/SteamOS ports were released. This talk will cover the learnings of one year of porting work from a programmer's point of view: DOs and DON'Ts and issues both expected and unexpected.