The 53rd annual conference debuts a curated day of games programming on Sunday, 19 July, spanning accessibility, audio, performance capture, and the economics of modern games development, with games content running all week
LOS ANGELES, July 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — SIGGRAPH 2026, taking place 19–23 July 2026 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, will open with the Games Summit, a new one-day track dedicated to game developers and enthusiasts. Held on Sunday, 19 July, the Games Summit brings together leading studios and indies for a day of talks and networking focused on how games are made and where the medium is headed.
The Games Summit is a deliberate widening of the lens. Alongside the technical, real-time rendering-focused conversations SIGGRAPH is known for, it makes room for the broader questions facing game teams today.
“SIGGRAPH is renowned for deep technical insights, and that isn’t going anywhere. This year’s games programming expands the scope with broader topics game developers are wrestling with right now,” said Emily Hsu, SIGGRAPH 2026 Games Chair. She notes that SIGGRAPH is known as the world’s premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, a category games squarely occupy.
A Full Day, From Comfort to Cinematics
The Games Summit runs from morning to evening on opening day and covers a deliberately broad range of topics, including accessibility, audio, visual effects, performance capture, pipelines, and the overall state of gaming.
The day opens with “Beyond the Dot: New Ways to Reduce Motion Sickness in Gaming”, from Adrian Ledda, Magalie Rosseeuw, and Ewa Trusz with Activision, which reframes motion comfort as an accessibility issue affecting up to a third of players and embeds inclusive design directly into gameplay systems.
A session on game audio follows, exploring how sound and music are layered into games. From there, the Battlefield 6 team at Electronic Arts presents “How We Brought the Franchise Vision to Life With Our Destruction System Debut”, treating destruction as a tactical gameplay ecosystem rather than visual spectacle. A Computer Animation Festival Animation Theater session midday spotlights games and cinematics work, before “Performance Capture at Scale: Building a Pipeline for Battlefield 6 Cinematics”, in which Pasha Sol from Electronic Arts details how EA Create Capture adapted film-grade virtual production to the pace and scale of AAA development.
The Economics of Building Games
One of the day’s marquee conversations is “Forging the Glacier at IO Interactive: Fireside Chat with Henrik Schlichter (Technical Director)”, joined by John Canning of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), on what it takes to build and scale utilizing the studio’s in-house proprietary game engine, Glacier. As the industry grapples with rising costs, shifting platforms, and an explosion of available tools, the question of how studios build their games has never been more consequential. Schlichter sits down to discuss, debate, and unpack the realities of modern game development: what it takes to build a custom engine, innovate at scale, and make games cheaper, faster, and better without sacrificing quality. Equal parts technical deep dive and industry reality check, the session takes on a pressure point the field rarely discusses openly.
“It’s not enough just to make great games. They also have to be economically sound,” Hsu explained. “If you’re trying to move faster and do it at a higher quality while still saving money, the only way is better tooling, better pipelines, and rethinking the technology behind it.”
Where Film and Games Meet
The convergence of film and games runs throughout the Games Summit, from performance capture to shared file formats.
The day’s closing “The OpenUSD Roundtable: Using an Open Source File Format in Film and Game Dev Pipelines” makes that convergence literal, seating film and game developers at the same table to work through a file format that now moves across both pipelines, while “Performance Capture at Scale: Building a Pipeline for Battlefield 6 Cinematics” shows EA Create Capture carrying film-grade virtual production techniques onto a AAA game stage for Battlefield 6 cinematics.
“We’re already seeing game cinematic pipelines leaning heavily on filmmaking techniques, and film pipelines being built on game engines so the lines aren’t blurred. They’re gone,” Hsu said. “What matters now is hybrid fluency in both. Those who have it can expand their toolkit and build the right pipeline for the project in front of them.”
Hsu continues, “That’s the spirit of SIGGRAPH. There are no wins from hoarding information or existing in an an echo chamber of a single way of working. We advance across industries and as studios if we’re actually sharing, cross-pollinating, and learning from each other.”
Games Content All Week
Games programming does not end when the Games Summit does. Throughout the week, games content appears across Talks, Courses, Production Sessions, Appy Hour, and Real-Time Live!. The flagship is “Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games”, the long-running course presented in two parts on Tuesday, 21 July, which brings production-proven rendering techniques to the stage from Natalya Tatarchuk of Activision alongside lecturers from EA SEED, Sony Interactive Entertainment, IO Interactive, and Roblox. Attendees can find it all when filtering by “Games” on the SIGGRAPH 2026 full schedule.
For Hsu, the goal is straightforward. “My hope is that game devs leave Sunday’s Games Summit feeling like they’ve already made great connections and experienced something worthwhile — and then realize the conference week is just getting started. The Games Summit stands on its own, but it is also part of a larger conference that brings together researchers, artists, and technologists who solve problems in ways that might surprise them. For those who can make the week of it, there’s a lot more where that came from.”
The Games Summit is open to Full Conference, Full Conference Supporter, and Experience badge holders. Games content in other programs may carry different registration access, so attendees should check each program’s page for details.
Together, the Games Summit and games programming across the week demonstrate how SIGGRAPH continues to champion bold ideas in games while advancing the future of computer graphics and interactive techniques. To explore this year’s conference and offerings, visit the website to see where games are headed, and register now to experience everything the Games Summit has to offer at SIGGRAPH 2026.
About ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, and SIGGRAPH 2026
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. ACM SIGGRAPH is a special interest group within ACM that serves as an interdisciplinary community for members in research, technology, and applications in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The SIGGRAPH conference is the world’s leading annual interdisciplinary educational experience showcasing the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques. SIGGRAPH 2026, the 53rd annual conference hosted by ACM SIGGRAPH, will take place live 19–23 July at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
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SOURCE SIGGRAPH 2026
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