Sustainable Research in Computer Graphics

Affinity group

From climate change to biodiversity loss and resource exhaustion, human activities are impacting Earth’s limits and Computer Graphics is no exception. How can our research practices and organizations evolve to respect these limits?

Our goal is to build a community of people who want to think about the broader impacts of our research and how to collectively work towards a more sustainable future.

Since 2024, we organize an annual community event at the SIGGRAPH North America conference, to form community around the topic of environmental impact of research activities within the field of computer graphics.

Events

Birds of a Feather SIGGRAPH 2026

July 21, 5-6PM - Los Angeles Convention Center Room 512

Following the success of the first two BoFs at SIGGRAPH 2024 and 2025, we hope to once again create a space for researchers who want to think about the broader impacts of our research and how to collectively work towards a more sustainable future.

Birds of a Feather SIGGRAPH 2025

Aug 12, 2025, 4-5PM - Vancouver Convention Center (East Building, Room 9)

In 2025 the BoF event gathered about 25 people, and featured a structured group reflection activity. Attendees exchanged on topics of systemic issues in the current research landscape, shared methods to mitigate negative impact, and discussed ways to make attending conferences more sustainable.

Birds of a Feather SIGGRAPH 2024

29 July 2024, 11:00am - 12:00pm MDT - Denver

In 2024, we organized the first version of the Birds of a Feather event on The Environmental Impact of Computer Graphics. This one hour session was organized around two open discussions: (a) one about the impact of our domain, and (b) one about how what we create and develop in our field can help reducing the impact of other ones.

Report

Publications

Towards a sustainable use of GPUs in Graphics Research

Emilie Yu Élie Michel Octave Crespel Axel Paris Felix Hähnlein

SIGGRAPH Talk - 2025

We surveyed 888 SIGGRAPH papers from 2018-2024 and gathered author-reported GPU models. By contextualizing the hardware reported in papers with available data of consumers’ hardware, we demonstrate that research is consistently developed and tested on new high-end devices that do not reflect the state of the consumer-level market.

Webpage Abstract Poster Code & Data DOI