The internet is filled with things. Here is one of them.
A photographer fixed the light rendering math in the 3D graphics industry2024 Dec 5
The linked PC Gamer article explains the whole situation, but briefly: early Valve employee, computer engineer and photographer and animator and creator of the G-Man Ken Birdwell was working on Half Life 2 when he noticed something off about the way light interacted with curved objects. He put in the effort to solve the bug, but then realized that the fundamental lighting math was wrong on the 3D graphics accelerator chips, something far out of the purview of Valve's video game software world. Birdwell says:
I had to go tell the hardware guys, the people who made hardware accelerators, that fundamentally the math was wrong on their cards. That took about two-and-a-half years. I could not convince the guys, finally we hired Gary McTaggart [from 3DFX] and Charlie Brown and those guys had enough pull and enough… I have a fine arts major, nobody's gonna listen to me. ...
The problem was, when I pointed this out to the graphics hardware manufacturers in '99 and early 2000s, I hit the 'you've just pointed out that my chips are fundamentally broken until we design brand new silicon, I hate you' reaction. That wasn't a fun conversation. It went through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, etcetera, all in rapid succession with each new manufacturer.
This reddit explains the technical side of things.
The linked PC Gamer article explains the whole situation, but briefly: early Valve employee, computer engineer and photographer and animator and creator of the G-Man Ken Birdwell was working on Half Life 2 when he noticed something off about the way light interacted with curved objects. He put in the effort to solve the bug, but then realized that the fundamental lighting math was wrong on the 3D graphics accelerator chips, something far out of the purview of Valve's video game software world. Birdwell says:
This reddit explains the technical side of things.