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https://github.com/panosk92/spartanengine

A game engine with a fully bindless, GPU-driven renderer featuring real-time path-traced global illumination, hardware ray tracing, and a physics simulation running at 200Hz, built over 10+ years of R&D
https://github.com/panosk92/spartanengine

atmospheric-scattering bindless bsdf car-simulation cpp cutting-edge ecs game-engine gpu-driven imgui livestream path-tracing physx ray-tracing restir-gi spartan ssao taa vulkan xess

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A game engine with a fully bindless, GPU-driven renderer featuring real-time path-traced global illumination, hardware ray tracing, and a physics simulation running at 200Hz, built over 10+ years of R&D

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

          


  Spartan Engine




One engineer. Ten years. A bindless, GPU-driven engine with real-time path-traced global illumination.





  A personal R&D engine, not a commercial product. No roadmap promises, no support queue, no compromises on the vision.






  Build Status

  Discord

  License






  Discord  · 

  X  · 

  Wiki  · 

  Issues




---



## The Engine



Spartan started as a university project. Ten years of nights and weekends later, its rendering technology runs in **Godot Engine** and **S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly**, ships in a **published programming book**, and anchors a community of **600+** engineers on Discord.



It is built around one philosophy: **favor real-time over baked, dynamic over static, modern over safe.** Every system here exists to serve that.



**There is a destination that gives all this tech a purpose.** Curious? **[Read the plan →](https://github.com/PanosK92/SpartanEngine/blob/master/plan.md)**



---



## The Trailer



[![Engine Trailer](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PanosK92/SpartanEngine/master/.github/images/video_promo.png)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMZ0epSVwCk)



---



## Worlds






Launch the engine and choose from a selection of default worlds. Each is physics-enabled—walk around, pick up objects with your mouse, or take a car for a spin.







### Forest






The most demanding world: **256 million** procedurally generated grass blades (inspired by Ghost of Tsushima), spanning **64.1 km²** covered with thousands of trees and rocks.



### More Worlds



| Sponza 4K | Basic |

|:-:|:-:|

| 
Classic Dubrovnik building—ideal for path tracing | 
Contains some render test objects |



| Liminal Space | Showroom |

|:-:|:-:|

| 
Reality shifts to a nearby frequency | 
Clean showcase—no experimental tech |



| [The Plan](plan.md) |

|:-:|

| 
A neon-soaked city, built to push the engine toward real-time path-traced driving through rain-slicked streets at 60fps, that's the plan. |



---



## Rendering



The renderer is built around one principle: **the GPU owns the data.** Every resource (geometry, materials, textures, lights, transforms, AABBs) lives in persistent, globally accessible buffers. No per-draw descriptor updates, no per-draw resource binding, no CPU-side draw loops.



### Architecture



- **Zero-binding draw path**, all per-draw data lives in a single bindless storage buffer, push constants carry only an index

- **Single global vertex and index buffer** for all geometry (inspired by id Tech), with **vertex pulling** that bypasses the Input Assembler and is shared by rasterization and ray tracing

- **GPU-driven indirect rendering** with per-meshlet frustum, Hi-Z occlusion, and backface cone culling, the CPU issues a single `DrawIndexedIndirectCount` per pass

- **Meshlet clustering** via meshoptimizer, no mesh shader dependency

- **Bindless everything**: materials, lights, samplers, uber shaders, minimal PSO permutations

- **Universal HLSL** compiled for both Vulkan (SPIR-V) and DirectX 12

- **GPU-side asset processing**: mip generation (FidelityFX SPD) and texture compression (Compressonator) at load time, not baked offline

- **Unified deferred rendering**, opaque and transparent surfaces share the same BSDF and render path

- **Async compute** for SSAO, screen-space shadows, and cloud shadows, parallel with shadow rasterization



### Lighting and Global Illumination



- **Clustered deferred shading** with a GPU-built logarithmic-Z grid and cone-vs-AABB culling for spots, scales to many local lights at near-constant per-pixel cost

- **ReSTIR path tracing** with spatiotemporal reservoir resampling for real-time multi-bounce global illumination

- **Hardware ray-traced reflections and shadows** via ray queries

- **Atmospheric scattering** and image-based lighting with bent normals

- **Volumetric fog and clouds** with temporal reprojection and shadow casting

- **Screen-space shadows** (inspired by Days Gone) and **XeGTAO** ambient occlusion

- **Shadow map atlas** with fast filtering and penumbra estimation



### Performance and Upscaling



- **Variable rate shading** and **dynamic resolution scaling**

- **TAAU**, temporal anti-aliasing with built-in upsampling, Halton-jittered with variance-clip history reprojection

- **Intel XeSS 2** upscaling

- **FXAA**

- **Custom breadcrumbs** for GPU crash tracing and post-mortem debugging



### Camera and Post-Processing



- Physically based camera with auto-exposure and physical light units (lumens and kelvin)

- Tonemappers: ACES, AgX, Gran Turismo 7 (default)

- HDR10 output

- Bloom, motion blur, depth of field, chromatic aberration, film grain, sharpening (CAS)



---



## Car Simulation — 200Hz



A full vehicle dynamics simulation running inside the PhysX fixed-timestep loop.



| System              | Details                                                                                            |

| ------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |

| **Tires**           | Pacejka MF 5.2 with combined slip, thermal model, pressure, wear, multiple surfaces                |

| **Suspension**      | Convex hull sweep contact, spring-damper, anti-roll bars, bump stops, bump steer, camber/toe       |

| **Weight transfer** | Geometric + elastic lateral split via roll center heights and roll stiffness                       |

| **Drivetrain**      | Engine torque curve, turbo, 7-speed gearbox, rev-match, open/locked/LSD differentials, RWD/FWD/AWD |

| **Brakes**          | Thermal model with fade, front/rear bias, slip-threshold ABS                                       |

| **Aerodynamics**    | Drag, front/rear downforce, ground effect, DRS, rolling resistance                                 |

| **Steering**        | Ackermann geometry, high-speed reduction, self-aligning torque                                     |

| **Assists**         | ABS, traction control, handbrake                                                                   |

| **Integration**     | Semi-implicit Euler with consolidated net-torque per wheel                                         |

| **Input**           | Controllers and steering wheels with haptic feedback                                               |

| **Camera**          | GT7-inspired chase camera with speed-based dynamics                                                |



---



## Engine Systems



| System            | Details                                                                                           |

| ----------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |

| **Particles**     | GPU-driven with compute emission and simulation, depth-buffer collision, soft blending            |

| **Animation**     | Skeletal hierarchies with keyframed clips and four-bone vertex skinning                           |

| **Physics**       | PhysX with rigid bodies, character kinematics, and vehicle dynamics                               |

| **Scripting**     | Lua 5.4 via Sol2 with full engine API and lifecycle callbacks                                     |

| **Audio**         | 3D positional audio, streaming, reverb, procedural synthesis via SDL3                             |

| **Input**         | Keyboard, mouse, controllers, and steering wheels with haptic feedback                            |

| **Entity system** | Component-based with transform hierarchies, prefabs, and XML serialization                        |

| **Threading**     | Hardware-aware thread pool with parallel loops and nested parallelism detection                   |

| **VR (WIP)**      | OpenXR with Vulkan multiview single-pass stereo across the full pipeline                          |

| **Profiling**     | Nsight/RGP-style timeline with separate graphics and async compute lanes, RenderDoc integration   |

| **Asset import**  | 40+ model formats (Assimp), 30+ image formats (FreeImage), 10+ font formats (FreeType)            |

| **Editor**        | ImGui-based with hierarchy, asset browser, inspector, script and shader editors, gizmos, profiler |



---



## Getting Started



### Building



One-click project generation—see the **[Building Guide](https://github.com/PanosK92/SpartanEngine/wiki/Building)** for details.



### Learning the Engine



Start with **[Game.cpp](https://github.com/PanosK92/SpartanEngine/blob/master/source/runtime/Game/Game.cpp)**, it shows how default worlds are loaded and is the best entry point for understanding the engine's structure. For gameplay scripting, check out the **[Lua Scripting Guide](https://github.com/PanosK92/SpartanEngine/blob/master/scripting.md)**, it covers the full API, lifecycle callbacks, and examples.



---



## Podcast



  

    

    

      Exploring the tech world and beyond



      Meeting the brightest minds across cutting-edge industries.



      📺 Watch on YouTube


      🎧 Listen on Spotify

    

  



---



## Community



### Contributing



Contributors get access to **[exclusive perks](https://github.com/PanosK92/SpartanEngine/wiki/Perks-of-a-contributor)** designed to accelerate learning and skill development.



**[Read the Contributing Guide →](https://github.com/PanosK92/SpartanEngine/blob/master/contributing.md)**



### Sponsorship



I cover the Dropbox hosting that makes the one-click setup work. If Spartan has taught you something, or if you just want to fuel another decade of this, **[sponsorship](https://github.com/sponsors/PanosK92)** goes directly into keeping the lights on and the project moving.



---



## Projects Using Spartan



| Project                    | Description                                                                                                                                                                                                                      |

| -------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |

| **Godot Engine**           | Integrates Spartan's TAA ([view source](https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/37d51d2cb7f6e47bef8329887e9e1740a914dc4e/servers/rendering/renderer_rd/shaders/effects/taa_resolve.glsl#L2))                                   |

| **S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly** | Rendering addon using Spartan's source ([ModDB](https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-anomaly/addons/screen-space-shaders))                                                                                                         |

| **Programming Book**       | Jesse Guerrero's [beginner programming book](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CXG1CMNK) features Spartan's code and community                                                                                                         |

| **University Thesis**      | Originally created as a portfolio piece while studying at the [University of Thessaly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Thessaly) with Professor [Fotis Kokkoras](https://ds.uth.gr/en/staff-en/faculty-en/kokkoras/) |



**Using code from Spartan?** [Reach out](https://twitter.com/panoskarabelas), I'd love to showcase your project!



---



## License



**[MIT License](https://github.com/PanosK92/SpartanEngine/blob/master/license.md)**, free to use with attribution.