Siggraph 2025: Why I won't miss it and you shouldn't either
If you love pixels, Siggraph is the place to gather! It's that simple!
Pixels! Whether you use the left side of your brain to calculate them or the right side to paint them, once you fall in love with them, there is no way back. Some of you love fast pixels you can interact with, some of you don’t mind waiting hours for the highest quality one.
Sometimes we need them pure, sometimes we mix them with video to enhance storytelling. Some of you want to put some pixels on a small screen, some of you on a high-refresh-rate monitor, some of you on a headset or maybe on a massive screen; what we have in common is that we love those little tiny suckers! They are a form of expression, the minimum component of our arts.
"SIGGRAPH brings together a constellation of perspectives that few other conferences can match <…> That diversity of thought is essential when exploring powerful new tools like generative AI, which demand careful consideration of ethical, creative, and technical implications." ACM President Yannis Ioannidis
For more than 50 years, we, the <pixel lovers> people, have been gathering at Siggraph, to share advances, insights, successes and failures, from on-boarding new blood to recognizing pioneers; to hear how the best in the industry solved their technical, production or artistic challenges and by listening to their deconstruction, understand what otherwise would look like magic on screen.
"…our work connects across academics, industry, and art. As we look to 2025, we're not just showcasing technologies, we're shaping the future of human-computer creativity." SIGGRAPH 2025 Conference Chair Ginger Alford
My Siggraph Journey
I have been to Siggraph several times in the last 15 years. At the beginning of my career, Siggraph was only a dream, even when I was an Engineering student / Intel Intern, building Render Farms with spare parts from the Intel warehouse in Colombia or later on in Brazil as a recent-college-graduate, it was completely unfeasible to attend Siggraph due to the combination of long distance plane tickets, unfavorable exchange rates and a starting salary of ~USD$900 / month (pre-tax and pre-caipirinhas)
Since I came to the U.S. in 2009, going to Siggraph was a no-brainer! It’s magical to get together with thousands of people that care about computer graphics of any kind (2D, 3D, video, VFX, real-time/interactive/miliseconds per frame, non-realtime/hours per frame). Siggraph attendees are technical, or artistic, or like me, love the interception of the left and right side of brains. There is something for everyone!
Must see events
As Julie Andrews would say: These are a few of my favorite things (at Siggraph):
Keynotes - Industry Visionaries describing recent achievements, challenges, sparking curiosity about the future, and a call to action for the industry. This year’s keynotes are:
Dr. Anjali Tripathi, Future Earth: Storytelling From Space and the Exoplanet Revolution and ACM SIGGRAPH Award Presentations
Autodesk: Mike Haley, Maurice Patel, Nikola Todorovic -- Redefining Creativity: The Future of Media & Entertainment With AI
Production Sessions - a deconstruction of some of the most challenging VFX in award winning movies and productions. If you grew up enjoying the bonus material on movie DVDs, you can’t miss these sessions!
Computer Animation Festival - What happens when talented artists have freedom to create? not just good-enough, deadline-driven, cost-optimized productions, I’m talking about a few dozen of the best animations in the industry, artists unleashed! Hint: bring tissues, be ready to experience many different emotions!
This year’s Siggraph will feature a very important event, titled: “30th Anniversary Toy Story Screening” presented by Ed Catmull, Pixar Co-Founder and Siggraph Pioneer. This Movie is so important to me and to the industry, that it will have its own separate article. Subscribe and stay tuned
All Aliens: [pointing up] The clawwwwwwwww!
Alien #1: The claw is our master
Alien #2: The claw chooses who will go and who will stay
Exhibition - As a tech guy, this is candyland! Top Workstation and Hardware components vendors, the latest Software booths full of demos and new capabilities, training / learning companies, many talks, experts everywhere. Many vendors offer free day passes, let me know if you need one!
Courses - usually a handful of presentations about a specific topic from the best of the industry. i.e. Are you into 3D Rigging? see many industry experts talk about how they rigged their latest many-leg, wobbly, shape-shifting creatures on their latest movie. Some of my favs this year are:
A Whirlwind Introduction to Computer Graphics - great for beginners!
Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games Part I & Part II - a must attend every year
Birds-of-a-feather - if you want to find a room full of people that care about a specific niche, this is for you. Being a performance / benchmarking obsessed engineer, my obvious favorite this year is:
Benchmarking Graphics Performance on Modern Computing Systems, presented by the SPEC Committee with presenters from Nvidia & Intel. Curious fact, I co-presented this course last year and with new versions of SPEC Viewperf and SPEC Workstation launched since, I can’t wait to see what the SPEC GWPG Committee will share on this class!
And these are just a few of the ~25 different program categories! Believe me, there are many more things going on! Academic Posters, Emerging Technologies, Labs, you name it! See the full program at: Siggraph 2025 - Full Schedule
To Siggraph and beyond!
If everything I mentioned above is not enough, there are plenty of amazing side events organized by vendors and organizations of all kinds. Be sure to subscribe as I’ll be compiling and sharing as many side events as I can find, they fill up fast! Also, I’ll be re-posting events on CavalryHQ’s feed on LinkedIn, since this will become a real-time feed as we get closer to the event.
The biggest gems (IMHO) related but not part of the official Siggraph program are:
Note: all of them require registration, so do your homework, find that Eventbrite or Lu-ma link, and register ASAP, they fill up fast!
The Pixar’s Art & Science Fair - Think about it as the Renderman’s State-of-the-Biz. A definite MUST for all Pixar and Renderman lovers. Ping your Pixar friends to get invited, or go to their exhibit booth and make a friend :-). The Pixar A&SF happens off-site, after hours and lasts a couple of hours. As a timeless bonus, you will walk out with a celebratory “walking little friend”
RenderMan Walking Teapot Museum 2024 - Credit: Pixar’s Dylan Sisson - Source: https://renderman.pixar.com/news/renderman-at-siggraph-2024 While you are there, you might enjoy one of these amazing cocktails. Great job Pixar, Dell, AMD & Nvidia with your cocktail naming! 🤓
Linux Foundation’s Open-source Days is hosted by the Hosted by Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) If you care about OpenUSD, OpenColorIO, MaterialX, OpenVDB, OpenPBR, VfxReference Platforms, Blender and more, this off-site multi day event is for you. Part of the agenda is open to anyone, while some parts required a Siggraph attendee badge. Virtual options available too
Foundry Education Summit - How to train not your dragon, but the next wave of VFX talent: join Foundry’s Education Summit at SIGGRAPH 2025 for tools, insights, and industry-led inspiration.
And of course, between Happy Hours and community events, there is something for everyone at #Siggraph2025 ! See you there!
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About the Author
This article was written by Hernán Quijano, Workstation Performance and Market Analyst at CavalryHQ. Our mission is to bridge the workstation industry and power users; improving guidance and removing technical roadblocks, so users unleash their talents focusing on accelerating software applications and workflows in Engineering, Media & Entertainment and A.I.
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Unless explicitly stated, this article has not been sponsored by any brand or organization | The author might personally own stock in one or multiple of the mentioned companies.
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