Hike the alps. Hyperfocus. Absorb wikias of fictional universes. Collect minerals. Talk fast and laugh loud. Listen to the same song for hours. Enjoy sharing and receiving knowledge. Memorize useless stuff. Daydream. Night Owl. Optimize things. Forget to eat. Listen to old metal. Work in bursts. Run out of ideas what to write here.
WHAT I DON’T
Believe in superstition. Accept authority. Enjoy smalltalk. Decide on a whim. Customer first. Social Media. Half-ass things. Forget acts of kindness. Work for free (except favors or good causes). Speak in buzzword salad. Do repetitive work.
ABOUT ME
Hello there, glad you made it! My name is Pascal Gilcher, a German rendering engineer, artist and mathematician.
On the Internet I’m better known by the name “Marty McFly” or nowadays just “Marty”, developing graphics modifications for various video games, most notably in recent time the ReShade Ray Traced Global Illumination Shader (“RTGI”). My work contributed to a countless amount of other mods, has been featured by lots of gaming magazines all over the world and can even be found in the NVIDIA Driver.
MORE ABOUT ME
Unlike most other graphics programmers/researchers, my journey did not start with a regular computer science education, although I do have a bachelor’s degree in applied computer science.
Never able to leave things as they are, I started tampering with games pretty much as soon as I got into gaming. I was more fascinated in the way games render their content than the content itself, and modifying them got me into graphics programming and shaders. This led me to pursue a career in software engineering.
As a result, my intuition when it comes to coding is GPU oriented and visual, which together with my formal computer science education and my various interests helps me improve my skills every day. What I love about shaders is that they can take you on a journey to lots of scientific fields and they make that fun! No graphical effect is like any other, there is always more to learn and discover. Ambient Occlusion requires you to study monte carlo integration, quasirandom sequences, cache efficient sampling and so much more. Color grading teaches you the intricacies of the human visual system, the concept of color spaces, Hermite splines and… I could go on.
Apart from programming, my interests span lots of topics. I’m an avid painter and sketch artist, photographer, astronomer (telescopes, not horoscopes!) and mathematician, just to name a few. My goal is to become a modern-day renaissance man, and maybe eventually be as great as a man as my father.
I’ve always had a passion for art and generally everything that looks nice, so my efforts are mostly focused on visuals. For the last few years, my work has been dedicated to the ReShade platform, a piece of software that allows to tweak the appearance of almost every PC game. Around 2019, my so-called ReShade Ray Tracing shader made the news and jumpstarted my Patreon. This has been a career defining moment and made me take my work much more seriously – after all, it’s related to video games.
MY WORK
Programming / Mathematics
(2023) Algorithm with much improved numerical stability for the Roberts Quasirandom Sequence
Can produce orders of magnitude more samples than the canonical variant and other methods, improving limit monte carlo integration error
(2021) New approximation for the atan2 function
Most atan2 approximations try to divide the domain into sectors and try to fit curves to that. I found that atan2(y, x) == sign(y) * acos(x * rsqrt(x^2 + y^2)) which opens new possibilities to approximate acos and rsqrt so that their errors cancel each other out. Results vary =P
Art
New to old, more or less. Oldest from when I was 14.
