Jichu Mao

Graphics performance engineer at TikTok

I work on real-time rendering and GPU performance. These are the renderers, shaders, tools and games I’ve built along the way.

See the workAbout me

A ball of orange, yellow and red flame-like spikes
Procedural Fireball, running live in your browser: about 240 lines of GLSL

Selected work

  • 2024Team of two

    World-Space ReSTIR in Vulkan

    World-space global illumination in a Vulkan ray-tracing pipeline. About 40% more accurate than screen-space ReSTIR in large scenes, for roughly 5% more render time.

    • ≈40%higher accuracy than screen-space ReSTIR in large scenes
    • ≈5%extra render time
    • 1.3 Mtriangles in the subway test scene, at 1 sample per pixel
    • Rendering & GPU
    • C++
    • Vulkan
    • GLSL

  • 2024Individual project

    CUDA Path Tracer

    A GPU path tracer in CUDA with glTF scenes, physically based materials, depth of field and environment lighting. Stream compaction cuts frame time from 25.7 to 18.2 ms in open scenes.

    • Rendering & GPU
    • C++
    • CUDA
    • GPU Programming

  • 2024Individual project

    WebGPU Forward+ and Clustered Deferred Shading

    Forward+ and clustered deferred shading in the browser. With 5,000 moving lights at 4K, clustered deferred runs above 100 fps where naive forward shading manages 3.

    • Rendering & GPU
    • TypeScript
    • WebGPU
    • WGSL

  • 2024Individual project

    Vulkan Grass Rendering

    Real-time grass in Vulkan. A compute shader simulates and culls every blade; with 32,768 blades, culling lifts the frame rate from 70 to 228 fps.

    • Rendering & GPU
    • C++
    • Vulkan
    • GLSL

  • 2024Individual project

    CUDA Flocking

    Reynolds’ boids simulated on the GPU with CUDA. A coherent uniform grid runs 100,000 boids at 2,677 fps where brute force manages 43.

    • Rendering & GPU
    • C++
    • CUDA
    • GPU Programming

More work

Portrait of Jichu Mao

About

I’m a Graphics Performance Engineer at TikTok, working on the real-time effect rendering engine. I hold a master’s in Computer Science & Computer Graphics from the University of Pennsylvania (May 2026).

Before that I interned at TikTok, Infold Games, Apple and the University of Alberta, and was a teaching assistant for Penn’s computer graphics courses. Away from the GPU I take photographs.

More about meRésumé (PDF)