I build physically based rendering engines and write about the theory, math and GPU engineering behind making them work, and making them work fast. Currently working on Novum, my research-oriented GPU path tracing engine based in CUDA/Optix, which has implemented algorithms such as ReSTIR PT (enhanced 2026), Bidirectional Path Tracing, Vertex Connection and Merging, Progressive Photon Mapping, and Heterogeneous Volumetric rendering.

My interests lie at the intersection between advanced global illumination algorithms (specifically path tracing), and the GPU engineering required to bring these algorithms to life. In practice, this means I do a lot of reading papers and a lot of debugging, profiling, and optimizing GPU kernels in both traditional wavefront compute architectures and more modern hardware raytracing oriented architectures.

I am a current undergraduate at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania’s Digital Media Design (DMD) major (CS & CG), within the Computer and Information Sciences department. You can contact me through email (danielhqin1127@gmail.com), or even find me on discord (_benchmade). I will always be excited to chat about anything path tracing or GPU related.