Computer Graphics Achievement Award
The computer graphics achievement award is given to an individual for outstanding achievement in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The award includes a prize of $2,000.
Current Recipient

For fundamental contributions to rendering, including visibility and shadows, perceptually-informed rendering, image-based rendering, and 3D Gaussian splatting.
ACM SIGGRAPH is pleased to present the 2025 Achievement Award to George Drettakis for pioneering work in shadow computation, sound rendering, and image-based rendering, including 3D Gaussian splatting.
George’s work on rendering has been highly influential, characterized by methods that are both principled and practical. This includes his foundational work on discontinuity meshing and visibility skeletons for accurate shadow computation, the development of perspective shadow maps to significantly reduce aliasing in shadow maps, and progress in hierarchical global illumination methods. His contributions on texture and materials include the use of Gabor noise as well as an early learning-based material estimation method. Perceptually-informed rendering has also been a key theme of George’s work, where his notable contributions have advanced the state of the art in both sound rendering and virtual reality.
George has also been at the forefront of the developments in image-based rendering, developed jointly with his students, postdocs, and collaborators. His work on depth synthesis and local warps demonstrated how to create high fidelity interpolations of captured images. His work on deep blending IBR was among the first to apply neural networks to improve the results of classical view-based interpolation. His most recent contribution in this area has been the phenomenal breakthrough of 3D Gaussian splatting for radiance field rendering, combining ideas from earlier point-based rendering with ideas in volumetric rendering used in neural radiance fields. It has not only generated hundreds of follow-on publications in the two years since it appeared but has also become a de-facto standard for efficient 3D reconstruction and real-time rendering of highly realistic (and even dynamic) scenes.
George received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Crete and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1994. He was an ERCIM postdoctoral fellow in Grenoble, Barcelona and Bonn. Since 1995, he has been a researcher with INRIA, first in Grenoble, where he was awarded his “Habilitation” at the University of Grenoble (1999). In 2000, he moved to INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, where he now leads the GRAPHDECO research group.
For over 30 years, he has taken on key leadership roles in the computer graphics community,
including technical papers chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2010, Associate Editor for ACM TOG,
and chairing the ACM SIGGRAPH Papers Advisory Group. He has had a key role in shaping computer graphics in Europe, as chair of the EUROGRAPHICS Steering Committee for the Working Group on Rendering, co-chairing the Eurographics Workshop on Rendering (1998), and as papers co-chair of the Eurographics Conference (2002 and 2008). George has mentored more than twenty Ph.D. students and as many post doctoral fellows who have gone on to have significant impact of their own in industry and academia.
Previous Recipients
- 2024 Aaron Hertzmann
- 2023 Wolfgang Heidrich
- 2022 Michiel van de Panne
- 2021 Doug L. James
- 2020 Kavita Bala
- 2019 Denis Zorin
- 2018 Daniel Cohen-Or
- 2017 Ramesh Raskar
- 2016 Frédo Durand
- 2015 Steve Marschner
- 2014 Thomas Funkhouser
- 2013 Holly Rushmeier
- 2012 Greg Turk
- 2011 Richard Szeliski
- 2010 Jessica Hodgins
- 2009 Michael Kass
- 2008 Ken Perlin
- 2007 Greg Ward
- 2006 Thomas W. Sederberg
- 2005 Jos Stam
- 2004 Hugues Hoppe
- 2003 Peter Schröder
- 2002 David Kirk
- 2001 Andrew Witkin
- 2000 David H. Salesin
- 1999 Tony DeRose
- 1998 Michael F. Cohen
- 1997 Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz
- 1996 Marc Levoy
- 1995 Kurt Akeley
- 1994 Kenneth E. Torrance
- 1993 Pat Hanrahan
- 1992 Henry Fuchs
- 1991 James T. Kajiya
- 1990 Richard Shoup and Alvy Ray Smith
- 1989 John Warnock
- 1988 Alan H. Barr
- 1987 Robert Cook
- 1986 Turner Whitted
- 1985 Loren Carpenter
- 1984 James H. Clark
- 1983 James F. Blinn
Nomination Procedure
ACM SIGGRAPH members are encouraged to nominate individuals for the Computer Graphics Achievement Award by sending an email to the Technical Awards Chair (technical_awards@siggraph.org) by January 31 of each year.
Requirements
- Name, address, phone number, and email address of the nominator
- Name and email address of the candidate
- Suggested citation (maximum of 25 words)
- Nomination statement (maximum of 500 words in length) addressing why the candidate should receive this award
Your nomination should describe a candidate’s most significant research contribution(s), and optionally describe industrial impact, community service, and/or other contributions to computer graphics and interactive techniques. The Technical Awards Committee uses nomination statements as the main basis for their selections, so a concise and clear statement is strongly encouraged. Descriptions of a small number of contributions (one is acceptable) are preferable to a long list of activities.