Panos Karabelas
CV
Rendering & engine programmerManchester, UK ↗

Panos
Karabelas.

I build the engines.
And the worlds within.

Creator of Spartan Engine. Graphics programmer at BeamNG. Previously AMD, Codemasters, and Sony. Twelve years of turning a personal obsession into pixels.

Explore the work
BeamNG / Graphics / Engine ProgrammerIndependent by instinct. Engineer by trade.
A red LaFerrari in a neon-lit showroom, rendered in Spartan Engine with path-traced lighting
Rendered in Spartan EngineReal-time. Built from scratch.
The signature project / 2014 — ongoing

Spartan Engine
C++ / Vulkan / DirectX 12One engineer. Twelve years. Open source.

A career inside
the frame.

BeamNGNowAMD ↗codemasters / EASONY
01 / The engineBuilt in public

Twelve years.
One uncompromising vision.

A complete engine, built from the ground up. Rendering, physics, audio, an editor. Every system is a chance to go deeper.

Inside Spartan
A sunlit forest rendered in Spartan Engine, with the engine editor visible
The forestProcedural worlds. Volumetric light.
Actual engine captures

  • ReSTIR path tracing

    Spatiotemporal reservoir resampling for real-time multi-bounce global illumination. No bake step, no light probes.

  • Zero-binding draw path

    All per-draw data sits in a single bindless storage buffer. Push constants carry an index and nothing else.

  • Hardware ray tracing

    Ray-queried reflections and shadows sharing one vertex-pulling path with the rasteriser.

3.1kGitHub stars
12 yearsOne engine. Near-daily.
600+Engineers on Discord
The source is the proof.
02 / Selected experienceRead the CV ↗

Built for the real world.
Shipped to the screen.

From GPU architecture to the final frame. A career working where hardware, engines, and ambitious games meet.

Returnal

Developer technology / AMD

DiRT 5

Senior graphics programmer / Codemasters

The Callisto Protocol

Developer technology / AMD

01

BeamNGCurrent

Graphics / Engine Programmer

2025 — Present
 02

AMD

MTS Developer Technology Engineer

2022 — 2024

Embedded with studios across the UK and Europe, profiling and rewriting their GPU pipelines. Returnal, The Callisto Protocol and Suicide Squad were among them.

 03

Codemasters (EA)

Senior Graphics Programmer

2020 — 2022

Shipped Dirt 5 across six platforms, from Stadia to Xbox Series X.

 04

Sony Interactive Entertainment

Generalist Programmer

2016 — 2019

Environmental-analysis AI and the debug tooling behind an unreleased PSVR title.
Beyond the day job

Rendering code used in Godot Engine and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly.

Microsoft Imagine Cup
World finalist, 2014.

03 / Field notesAll writing ↗

Thoughts behind
the pixels.

Rendering, first principles, and the occasional detour into what any of this means.

Mar 202620 min read

Spacetime is the headset. Consciousness is what's there when you take it off.
Feb 202615 min read

What building a game engine for a decade and the SR-71 Blackbird have in common
Mar 20244 min read

HDR in under 10 minutes
Panos at his desk, surrounded by monitors and handwritten graphics diagramsAlways a work in progress.

04 / The person behind the pixels

Relentlessly
curious.

Greece to Manchester. Doom 3 to a game engine of my own. What started as a question about how games work became a life spent building the answer.

The longer story
Off the clock / On the record

The Panos Karabelas Podcast

Conversations with people pushing their own fields forward.

Listen to the conversations
The work gets better when it’s shared.

Come build with us.

600+ engineers. Rendering deep dives, work in progress, and a shared obsession with how things work.

Join the Discord